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t LIBRARY OF CONGRKSS. t 

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! HNITRD STATES OK AMERICA, t 



TRACT NO ONE 



FIRST PRINCIPLES, 



BY WHICH 



J THE MYSTERIES or HUMAN LIFE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION 
AND SPIRITUALISM ARE OPENED, 



FOU THE CURE 



OF 

MORAL di; PHYSICAL EVIL 

VIZ., 



IGNORANCE, 


ERROR, 


POVERTY, 


CHIDING, 


DISSENSION, 


IDLENESS, 


BAD TEMPER, 


INFIDELITY, 


YAGRANCY, 


PASSION, 


FALSEHOOD, 


EXCESSIVE TOIL, 


STRIFE, 


DISAPPOINTMENT, 


INTEMPERANCE, 


ItEVENGE, 


GRIEF. 


PROSTITUTION, 


STREET FIGHTS, 


DISEASE, 


THEFT, 


DUELLING, 


BAD TIMES, 


SWINDLING. 


MURDER, 


OPPRESSION, 


ASSASSINATION, 


WAR, 


FAMINE, 


HOUSEBREAKING, 


INSANITY, 


RIOTS, 


EXPENSIVE G0VERN3IENTS 


.SUICIDE, 


INCENDIARISM, 


PUNISHMENT, Ac, &c. 



'' Back, back to first principles, or the world can neror be righted." 

" Happy is he who knows the causes of things." — Sevnca. 
' No one acted contrary to what he apprehended it were best to do, except from ignoranee of 
what were heat."... Socrates, 

*' Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth, is fallen 
is fallen."... i^eu. 17, 5 t£ 18, 2. 



BY JOHN DURWARD. 



NEW ORLEANS : 
PRINTED BY SHERMAN, WHARTON & CO., 41 CAMP STREET, COR GRAVIER. 



80 U.S. 



TRACTiNO ONE 



FIRST PRINCIPLES, 



BY WHICH 



THE MYSTERIES of HUMAN LIFE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION 
AND SPIRITUALISM ARE OPENED, 

FOE THE CURE 

OF 

MORAL * PHYSICAL EVIL; 

. VIZ., 



IGNOllANCE, 


ERROR, 


POVERTY, 


CHIDING, 


DISSENSION, 


IDLENESS, 


EAD TEMPEK, 


INFIDELITY, 


VAGRANCY, 


PASSIOX, 


FALSEHOOD, 


EXCESSIVE TOIL, 


STRIFE, 


DISAPPOINTMENT, 


INTEMPERANCE, 


REVENGE, 


GRIEF, 


PROSTITUTION, 


STREET FIGHTS, 


DISEASE, 


THEFT, 


DUELLING, 


EAD TIMES, 


SWINDLING. 


MURDER, 


OPPRESSION, 


ASSASSINATION, 


WAR, 


FAMINE, 


HOUSEBREAKING, 


INSANITY, 


RIOTS, 


EXPENSIVE GOVERNMENTS 


SUICIDE, 


INCENDIARISM, 


PUNISHMENT, &c., &q. .. 




'•'Rack, back to first principles, or the world can never be rightecS^^^ 

" Happy is he who knows the causes of things," — Seiieca. ^^C ~ 

"No one acted contrary to what he apprehended it were best to do, esc5j)ik£cQfii ignorance of 

what were best."...»S<5crai!es. 

"Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and aborainations of the earth, is fallen, 

is fallen."... 2?ef. 17, 5 <& 18, 2. 



BY JOHN DURWARD. 




NEW ORLEANS : 

PRINTED r>Y SHERMAN, WHARTON & CO., 41 CAMP STREET. COR. ORAVIER. 

80 U.S. 



.^o^ 

^\^ 



ERRATA 



On Page 8, line 10, read arbitrary for ''abitrary'^ 

do 13, line 14, read Russia with France Britain and Turkey 

do 20, line 24, read are prepared for "smd". 

do 27, line 6, final causes for "first". 

do 64, line 19, read things for " beings'^ 

do 75, line 34, read words for "works". 

do 75, line 35, read Lord possessed for "Soul possessed" 

do 76, line 3, read where for " when". 

do 76, line 24, read Holy Cross for "They Cross". 

do 79, line 21, read their wills for "these". 

do 80, line 4, read interpolation for "interpretation". 

do 90, line 24, read then for " than". 

do 91, line 9, read so as to move the for "so as the". 



Copyright secured. Entered according to the Act_ of Congress, in Hie Clerk's office of the 
Southern District of Louisiana by John Dukwaed. 



^<b 






CONTENTS. 

I.— THE CAUSE OF EVIL. 
II— THAT MAN HAS NOT REACHED HIS TRUE STATE. 
III.— THE ACTUAL OR VISIBLE WORLD OF HUMAN LIFE, THE 

FAC-SIMILE OF THE IDEAL. 
IV.— INTELLIGIBLE FIRST FACTS NECESSARY, 
v.— THAT THERE IS A LAW OF MIND GOVERNING ALL VOLUN- 
TARY IMOTION, WHICH MUST FORM THE GREAT FIRST 
PRINCIPLE OF A BETTER STATE OF CIVILIZED LIFE. 
VI.— THE GREAT DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE MESSIAH, 
VII.— THE CHANGE. 



CHAPTER I. 
THE CAUSIS OF EVIL. 

To hint at sucli a thing as the cure of physical and moral evil 
on the first principles of the present received theory of man, or 
to entertain the most remote idea of any considerable improve- 
ment in human life, far less to dream of millennial bliss, is not 
only very wrong, but the height of folly, and would justly entitle 
the person broaching such a chimera to a residence in the nearest 
lunatic asylum. 

Although such a view is tolerated in the teachings of every 
sect, and although the soul of man has through every generation 
•for ages been looking for the realisation of the bliss thus solemnly 
promised, yet it has so long since ceased to hope on the subject, 
or the period is placed always so far in the future, that when the 
teacher refers to it, every one, himself included, knows he does 
not mean it — that he really means nothing by it— that he is only 
preaching, and therefore must be allowed to say then and there 
what he chooses. 

Notwithstanding this flourish of trumpets under the sacred 
name of religion, the induced state of the minds of men and their 
early culture have a great deal to do with their condition, the 
nature, quality and turn of their thoughts, feeling, language, dis- 
position and action, as well*as with the health of their bodies, and 
the peace and well-being of the body politic. This no one can 
dispute, because it is the state of the mind which makes the dif- 
ference between savage- and civilized life, between one nation and 
another, between the sects, between one man and another, even 
between the same man at one time and at som(^ other, and be- 
tween health and sickness. It is, then, not only mind, but the 
state of the mind that makes the man. 

It is, however, an assumed first principle of the system, af^ 



6 

taught and practised, that the evil is in the man ; that he is natu- 
rally and constitutionally so ; and that it has therefore to be got 
out of him in some way or other not yet understood, after thou- 
sands of years of disputation and experiment. Some recommend, 
under the authority of Parliament, the mitre, or crown, in order 
to take or keep out the devil, the sprinkling of a little mystic 
water on him as soon as possible after birth, at the same time 
making the mystic sign ol* the cross ; others think it better to 
defer and wash him into it after he has been well broke in ; some 
consider it very efficacious to talk to him, to give him plenty of 
precepts, but never example; to frighten or lash him into good- 
ness ; while others judge that it is better to let him alone until 
evil habits are fixed on him, then to chain and confine him in a 
dark cell among others that are worse. Not a few deem it more 
advisable to l^.ang him at once ; but there are some very serious 
persons who consider that he will require an eternity of discipline, 
and that even then that will not do it. 

Now it becomes a cjuestion of the most startling import, which* 
is right ? Is it he who charges the sad condition of mankind to 
their induced states of mind, or he who lays it at the door of their 
nature ? This, tlieii, is the question, on the calm and unbiassed 
solution of which ''hangs a tale"=a solution which becomes 
itself the condition, according as the human understanding shall 
render its verdict, of the race either to fall back, or " forward- 
march !"' 

Every one must see the great ditierence betvveen tUe two views, 
because if mental and bodily ill, obliquity and sickness, exist in 
and arise from the nature, no cure can be effected ; the good 
time can never come— no redemption of the world is possible any 
more than it has hitherto, on such first principles, been found 
practicable, except in preaching. 

But if it can be demonstrated with the same degree of certainty 
as any proposition in Euclid, that those ills, one and all, exist in, 
arise from, and*are solely caused by the theory of man as taught 
and practised — that it is only man's state, not his nature, which 
is brought on by the false, fallible, ever-changing and mistaken 
learning of the sects, mistaken notions of God, of a remedy, of 



the nature of belief, of no law regulating the motions of the world 
of the mind, as carried out in social intercourse and human gov- 
ernment ; that it is the spirit that is awoke in his soul, the dis- 
position and habitudes given, and the conditions imposed on him, 
which cause both physical and moral evil — then it becomes at 
once certain that a cure is both possible and practicable ; and 
what is better, those ills, great and virulent as they are, appearing 
to belong to the race as a second nature, descending, as they do, 
morally and physically, from father to son, and requiring only 
time to mature in order to cut off individuals, families, communi- 
ties and nations, may be rooted out and finally prevented. 

Who, then, are the real visionaries ? 

Before, however, a remedy can be proposed, it is first neces- 
sary to ascertain what moral and physical evils are, how they 
come, by whom they are brought on and kept up in the world, 
and for what purpose ; how they work, and then show how they 
are to be extinguished. 

These subjects, second to none in the whole range of truth, 
will form the matter of discussion in three succeeding tracts, of 
which this forms the first. 

During the untutored stage of the minds state, man sees little 
or no order in the operations going on around or within him. He 
can form n© conception <&f the great fact that everything which he 
beholds, himself included, is under the guidance of unalterable 
laws. He can trace an uniformity as far as to the rising and 
setting of the sun, the phases of the moon and the return of the 
seasons. But beyond these, to him all is self-action, arbitrary rule 
and contingency ; while his mental vision can perceive no more of 
the fixed order he is in the lowest or savage state, limited to 
the animal portion of his nature. 

Precisely in the ratio, however, as he comes to note the regu- 
larity in the workings of external nature, the use of means to 
ends, falls in with the established order, and traces the unity of 
design pervading all things, he progresses through five different 
stages of civilization up to the period when he stands dubious, as 
he does now, in unbelief, or afraid to proceed without the aid of 
moral fallacies concerning the existence of fixed laws in the 
realm of mind. 



From the mental vision being closed to the truth that mind is 
but a portion of the Divinity in origin and nature; and that this 
relationship has not and cannot be dissolved, but that it is only 
obscured for a season by the mists of error ; and from being un- 
able to see the close connection between the mind's socially 
induced states and its determinations or acts of the will, he is led 
to consider, after being under the necessity of giving up all 
notions of self-rule or contingent action in material nature, that, 
in the motions of mind or voluntary action, there still exists a for- 
tuity or abitrary spontaniety. 

Here, at least, he still sees, or thinks he sees, such a thing as ac- 
cidence, self-action and hap-hazard. Here he imagines a power in 
mind acting independent of causes, that is self- controlling, and 
that cannot be reached or governed by moral measures. Hence 
he forms his theory, feelings, language, religion, law and inter- 
course on the dread error, that like effects do not always necessa- 
rily follow like causes in moral as in physical nature, or that 
when they differ the causes have been in the same ratio changed. 
With this phantom of the imagination, this elementary error, th e 
spirit of evil enters the human soul, and works the fearful results 
as seen and felt by man or recorded of the race. Generation after 
generation rises to misery and sinks in night, and ages must 
elapse before the bubble bursts, or the day dawns. 

What, then, is evil ? It is the the suffering of body or mind 
through false mental or injurious physical impressions. It is but 
the confliction of the supposed order of man with the divine order 
of God. There is no law, germ, or personal agent of evil in his 
universe apart from undeveloped mentality, baseless first princi- 
ples, or hieroglyphic figures of ancient language. There never 
was a creation of human ill, nor is there any other cause of its 
existence, except the illusions, the moral ignus fatuus leading the 
traveller to his doom, that spring up during the night of intellect 
in the professed teacher's dark brain. 

Being, then, but the product of the dark hour or infancy of 
mental science, by the substitution of supposed rule in room of 
the divine laws for the regulation and government of a moral and 
physical being, it has no necessary existence in the order of final 



causes. It is therefore merely occasional, aud with the occasion 
must die. In the ratio, then, as man's mental vision comes to be 
opened, as he can see himself in his real nature, apart from social 
impost, and trace his sufferings to their cause, instead of sighing, 
weeping, and asking God to alter the fixed laws of the universe, it 
dies ; or, like a cloud on the sun, it passes off. Admit the light, 
and it is gone. 

Its birth, rise, triumph and final overthrow form the theme of 
the sacred mysteries of all nations of antiquity. Those mysteries 
admitting only of a moral or spiritual sense, but coming down to 
our times unopened, or in their original figurative style, consti- 
tute the inexplicable material of all modern persuasions. This 
hieroglyphic, or picture writing, the first form of written lan- 
guage, in use ages long forgotten before the invention of alpha- 
betic signs, from never having as yet been translated into the 
present form of knowledge, thought, language, or reasonable 
belief, has been made the innocent cause of the false mental im- 
pressions, and the division and subdivision of the human family 
into an endless number of hostile sects. 

Those sublime and expressive lessons of the wisdom of the 
long past having been made by councils and synods the subject 
matter of mystic creeds never to be settled, of endless dispute, 
reasoning in a circle and contradiction ; and from the world 
having lost all clue to their true signification, have thus become 
the chief source of false mental and physical impressions, of 
stultifying the intellect, ruining the soul, and consequently the 
great cause of physical as well as moral evil. 

By the literal rendering of one of the most exquisite hierogly- 
phics of ancient Egypt and Chaldea, the birth-places of modern 
mysteries, which picture formed one of their constellations of the 
heavens, and of which a sculptured tableau has been found in the 
ruins of a Chaldean temple, those councils and synods have con- 
strued into the revelation of a fall. The fall of the emanation of 
Deity, the human soul, in that, as they say, of a first pair eating 
the fruit of a tree. 

Now the very words themselves, " the serpent said unto the 
woman," might convince any one except those in receipt of ^ 



10 

yearly stipend, or a bench of " lords spiritual," even a four-year 
old might see that this was but a strong and very expressive 
figure containing a wise moral. A serpent speaking ! A what ? 
Yes, a serpent ! 

As we proceed in opening up the mystery of evil in order to 
find the remedy, such writings of a former epoch will be fully 
explained as conveying moral truth, and which are to be under- 
stood in a spiritual or moral, not in the literal sense. Such a 
reading of hieroglyphics proves itself so false and absurd as not 
to be worthy of serious refutation, if it had not been made the 
base of a false state of asseciated man, and an aristocratic reli- 
gion merely designed for the vulgar masses. 

But this is not all. There being five different races of the 
human species, such a construction is untenable, as it would have 
required five first pairs to have fallen instead of only one. How- 
ever, those councils and synods not being anatomists, can bring, 
the negro from the white man, or the white man from the negro, 
although their physical construction is so widely different. 

Even Milton falls into this error. He says, 

" The only two of mankinci, but in them 
The whole included race, his purposed prey." 

Moreover, they give us their word for it that this decadence 
was effected through a power man possesses of what they term 
free will. Such a power, however, cannot belong to any organ- 
ized existence, because dependent on the First Cause, on induced 
states of mind and attending conditions. This view of the will is 
completely exploded by Locke in his "Essay on the Human Under- 
standing", but neither he nor any one else carries out the true 
view to its legitimate consequences. 

It is, then, nothing but a learned blunder, taken from the fact 
that man possesses a power to do things according to his will, or 
as he pleases, and which come within his power of doing. The 
dispute has lasted over 2000 years between the interested sup- 
porters of society as it is and has been, who, while they 
admit the truth of the contrary doctrine, as does Prof. Kant, 
deny its applicability ; and those who contend that truth is neces- 
sary, beneficial, practicable, and must be soon triumphant, because 



n 

that it alone is calculated to raise man to the happiness of his 
nature. As, however, this philosophical error, so contrary to the 
true science of human nature and the real sense of the sacred 
mysteries, plays the most conspicuous part in the whole of amis- 
taken religion, the false system of society, and in the production 
of physical and moral evil, its correction must form the pivot, 
centre and grand turning-point for the cure of human ill and the 
redemption of man. 

It is also asserted; that on account of this second revolt in the 
divine government, the angels having broken loose before, the 
nature of the human soul became from that time evil. 

Now this is as false an impression as any of the former, and 
equally fatal. It has led mankind, in all ages and countries, to 
charge the evil to the nature; hence they have sought to alter 
the nature ; to purify and restore it ; to castigate, abuse, imprison, 
burn or hang man to cure his nature, while it only required sim- 
ply a change and correction of the agencies, which had been at 
work on his soul and body since even before he saw the light of 
day, and thus bring about physical and mental well-being. 

Instead of man being in league with evil spirits and personified 
principles called demons, the natural friend, ally, or voluntary 
agent of evil, he is, and has ever been, through wrong impressions, 
its unwilling victim, sacrificed on the altar of false first principles. 
The entire species have ever been, and are still, its sworn enemy, 
in so far as they see that it is so. 

The only object that the united energies of man seems to have 
had in view, and been directed towards, through that power which 

" Shapes our ends, 
Eough hew them as we may ;" 

the only purpose every individual every hour of his existence is 
laboring to attain ; all the hopes, sighs, groans, tears, sufferings 
and blood have been concentrated in this one grand point— the 
victory over evil. Even oppression, error, poverty, vice, crime, 
war :md disease are consecrated to the saving of the race — the 
triumph of truth over error. Nations and sects have risen having 
this for their aim. They flourished as long as they could elicit 
some truth, some good. Their mission lasted just so long as they 



12 

could conduce to bring man from savage life. But when they 
can do no more in this direction they are driven off the stage to 
make room for others, who will push forward the great work of 
man's redemption from political tyranny and mental oppression. 

Such being, then, the plain councils of the Eternal^ the nation 
who would live, who would go far down in the future, must ignore 
the literal readings of pure Egyptian hieroglyphics, the means 
by which despots and tyrants stultify the minds of their serfs, 
vassals and subjects, must rear no blood-stained altars to the aris- 
tocratic deity of modern Europe. And, if Europe's sons travel 
into foreign climes, he who has felt the iron of the aristocrat, the 
"priest and the Levite," enter his soul, let him leave the fatal 
poison of the mind, the cause of physical and moral evil, behind 
him, and become the devoted missionary of mental as well as of 
political liberty. 

In so far as mankind have been able to master the aristocratic 
element of human misery and the false learning of taking the 
literal for the intended sense of a form of writing now no more, 
as designed for the masses, by public schools and the press, in the 
same proportion have their minds been developed, evil been van- 
quished, and the world blessed. And in as far as they still suffer 
the illusions of the dark ages, oligarchies, hierarchies, disease and 
evil are still triumphant, and man is just so far from true know- 
ledge and the science of himself. 

No wonder, then, if some of the sects should be alarmed at the 
readino- of the Bible in schools and by the people. Their danger 
is imminent : but they are too late ! 

According, then, to the true moral economy of the world, 
human ill, the aristocrat, the "priest and the Levite" are neces- 
sarily designed for the divine purpose of hurrying on the lagging 
powers of mind, the breaking of the mental day, to bring the 
wanderer to right, the prodigal feon home to his father's house. 
Man has been feeding on the husks that swine do eat. The moon 
of physical force has ruled the night of human governments ; it 
would again bring on anarchy, and again steep the world in dark- 
ness. But the sun — "the sun of righteousness^ with healing 
under his wings" — the sun of moral suasion and blissful influ- 
xic es, must bring on and rule the day^ 



13 

"Like doves to their windows," the oppressed of all nations 
are flying to hail the rise of the " better sun :" therefore the duty 
of the enlightened and free is to shed abroad the true light, which 
is, that it is not man that is innately vicious, but the deplorable 
conditions under which he has existed that are dark and evil ; 
that it is not the human will, but the induced states of his mind, 
which impel to vice, drunkenness, swearing, fighting, arson and 
murder. 

It is nearly 4,000 years since the same Egyptian mysteries 
for the people caused the exodus of the Children of Israel from 
the house of bondage. These mysteries brought destruction to 
ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The same occult views 
produced the wars of the Crusades, of England and Scotland, of 
Russia, France, Britain Turkey, they are the cause of the 
riot, degradation, vassalage, poverty and sufferings of the 
masses of Europe, and cause their exodus from their house 
of bondage. The divine right of kings to govern wrong caused 
the American war, and that of Napoleon Bonaparte. The same 
dark views will bring ruin on every existing nation, unless that 
nation shall throw open their hidden sense. But, according to the 
predictions of the magi of Egypt, the time has arrived for the 
opening of those sealed truths, the time when " knowledge was to 
be increased." 

" Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots^ abomina- 
tions of the earth is fallen, is fallen." 

In bringing such grave charges, however, while discussing the 
subject of the cause of human ill, it is necessary to explain and 
substantiate them by good evidence and examples. 

To bring, then, man to God, to the laws of his nature, to lead him 
to imitate the primitive Christians in their contempt for riches, in 
despising this world's vain pomp, and in their utter abhorrence of 
shedding the blood of their fellow-men, either in peace or in war. 
The Church of England receives $47,297,825 yearly, wrung from 
the toiling masses. This is a much larger sum than that received 
by all the rest of the sects of Christendom put together ; but this 
sum is enough to conserve moral and physical ill, and contains argu- 
ments of sufficient weight to convince the learned, the rich, their 



14 

dependants, and the tarriers on dead men's shoes of false mental 
impressions, the divine right of kings, of the truth of the aristo" 
cratic form of society, of the fallen nature of man, of free will to 
determine right, with all the conditions of wrong in attendance, 
the power of Parliament and the crown to settle matters of 
opinion and make the entire body of the people, whether coming 
within its pale or not, pay for a religion called Christian. This, 
then, is the Reformation of 1688, or persecution modernized ; but 
which has caused a rapid increase in doubt, dissent and disbelief. 

Instead, however, of imparting true "views of the divine order — 
the fixed laws of the physical and moral world, which are 
the will of God — the whole aim of this world's church for 200 
years has been to keep the people to the same Egyptian dark- 
ness, to the Scythian law of tythes, to taxation without represen- 
tation, to the government of physical not moral force, to respon- 
sibility on the side of the people and non-responsibility on the 
part of the law power, to ,the great superiority of one Christian 
brother's blood over that of another, to the Egyptian right of 
primogenitureship, to the monopoly of God's heritage to his off- 
spring, the soil of their birth, by conquest or legal robbery, and 
thus retaining the masses, or, as it terms them, the "lower 
orders," as vassals to the aristocracy. Such, alas ! is this church 
militant ; but any one would say ^* church triumphant." Such is 
the church which says of Americans that they are " a Godless 
people," because they rear no blood-stained " altars to the un- 
known God," because they will never have a church supported 
and propogated by the bayonet ! 

But, afraid of mental light, and assured that on its approach 
their fanes must moulder alongside of those of the Druid and 
Catholic, they opposed school instruction, in order to keep the 
people as long as possible without knowledge, and therefore the 
longer without their rights as men. In this they equal the Greek, 
Romish and Russian Churches. Here, then, we have the cause 
of the extreme wealth on the one side and extreme poverty on 
the other, and this state necessarily becomes itself the cause of 
ignorance, vice, disease, burning of ricks, crime, the great number 
of jails, workhouse-unions, and of a mother killing her own 



15 

child to get the few shillings allowed by a burial society to which 
she belonged. Such is the base, the first facts on which 
England rests. 

The government in shame has, however, of a recent date, forced 
on their State Church national schools, and one liberal univer- 
sity, that of London, where dissenters may take their degrees. 
At her universities of Oxford and Cambridge the students gradu- 
ating must subscribe to her thirty-nine articles, and take an oath 
to support the crown, the Protestant religion, and oppose the 
Romish faith ; while the Romish bishops on being installed into 
office must take an oath to " persecute heretics to the death." 

Even in this age and generation, this war-inspiring, fox-hunt- 
ing, race-going, gambling-loving, proud, because wealthy, church 
awoke the fell spirit of persecution, which had been allowed to 
slumber, and imprisoned Richard Carlyle, a printer, in Dorchester 
jail for twelve years, and the " Rev." Robert Taylor for twelve 
months in the Fleet. Before these acts not one in a million had 
ever seen or read infidel writings, but no sooner did this church 
try her hand on a printer, than there was not one to the million 
who did not or might not have them in his own hands. The same 
was the result in France of the Romish clergy proscribing Sue's 
*' Wandering Jew;" the whole edition being immediately bought 
up by the people. 

To prove that the bench of " lords spiritual," who all die ex- 
tremely rich, but never bequeath anything for charitable purposes, 
are opposed to the interests and the rights of humanity as well as 
the correction of old abuses, they all voted against the Reform 
Bill except the Bishop of Norwich. 

To show, also, that there is a strong outside pressure as well as 
putrefaction going on within. To catch the popular breeze and 
avert immediate dissolution she, according to the Twies of 11th 
August, 1854, alters her prayer-book in 598 difi'erent places, 
makes amendments and repairs in the Athanasian creed ; in bap- 
tism dispenses with making the sign of the cross, unless by 
request ; the words, ^^ by baptism regenerated," are replaced by 
the term " regenerated," the name of priest is erased, and excom- 
munication was spoken of by the commission, but it was too late I 



16 

Here we must close the testimouj that false mental impres- 
sions, as imposed on a portion of the world, are the cause of evil, 
with giving in the evidence of two of her own clergy, in good 
standing. 

The " Rev." C. Kingslev, the famed author of '' Alton Locke," 
says, in his "Mission of the Church," that the vices of the people 
could alone be attributed to theii' poverty and ignorance, and 
these, again, to the wrongs and injustice they suffer at the hands 
of the rich; while to the latter must be assigned, by direct impli- 
cation, the responsibility of all the social evils that prevailed to 
so alarming an extent." 

Archdeacon Paley, also, in his political eeonomy, attests that 
the laws of property, as they exist, are wrong and dangerous, 
causing crime and most of thje evils in society. 

Little as mankind may thus appear to have gained by the Re- 
formation, yet as that event recedes in the lapse of years, it must 
rise in the estimation of the ages it has freed from the fell spirit 
of evil, as a light was then struck which must light up the entire 
world of the soul ; and as the darkness fiies, as man opens his 
vision on the divine order shining around and within him, so the 
ills of life vanish with their cause. 

Luther did much in letting in some rays of daylight on the 
darkness of bygone ages : he nobly attacked a power which de- 
nied to man the right to reason or think, and mortally wounded 
the hydra : but he did not lay down the true first principles that 
were to bring man to the fixed laws of his being. He justly 
denied the right of the Pope to sell indulgences, he broached 
the true idea that the language of the sacred writings was to be 
understood figuratively and spiritually, not literally; that they 
consisted of highly-wrought figures of speech and sublime meta- 
phor ; that bread and wine could but be bread and wine still ; 
and that they were signs and symbols of the things signified ; 
these being, in the true sense, merely an occult picture of the 
constituents of humanity. 

But he did not show who the devil, the fiends, hell, angels, 
spirits, witches, heretics and criminals were ; nor did he even con- 
ceive that there was a divine sense, a hidden mystery, a spiritual, 



17 

not a literal rendering of the rest of the personifications of 
those ancient writings; who the Divinity coming in man, the Virgin 
Mary, Joseph; Noah, the ark and deluge; Adam, Eve, the serpent 
and the tree were. As sound views on these subjects, in harmony 
with each other, the laws of moral and physical existence, and 
the attributes of Divine Intelligence come to be entertained, it 
will be at once perceived that these all refer to mind, and are to 
be explained morally or spiritually to make sense ; that the sus- 
ceptibilities of human nature are of such a high order, so delicate 
and extremely tenacious, as to be the clear exponent of the 
quality, nature and direction of attending impressions ; and that 
the human will necessarily takes its cue from the mind's states 
thus impressed. 

Therefore it Mill be shown in the following pages, that evil is 
not in the nature of man but in the theory; that the will follows 
with the most unvarying precision the socially imposed states o^ 
mind ; that it is not man but the agencies attending him that 
have to be corrected in order to cure mental and physical evil, 
and that moral, not physical, force is alone calculated to effect 
this great change in man's state. 

Deep, then, in the moral sentiments of mankind, in there most 
sacred feelings and views, in every quarter of the globe, among 
every people and sect, we have the grand secret of this world at 
least relative to the cause of physical and moral ill, where least of 
all it could have been expected. The very means employed to 
set and keep mankind to right, to induct them into the path of 
truth, virtue, health and the general weal, have thus been made 
the very cause of their ignorance, dissent, intolerance, poverty, 
drunkenness, disease, arson, murder and war. 

This is more clearly established as we come to examine the 
" Catholic" element as the cause of evil, whether of Rome, 
Greece or Russia. Without one benign principle, the social 
instead of the individual, the affectionate, forbearing and tolerant 
spirit, the peace«practice and pure life of primitive Christians, 
those rival churches, with a similar creed, but torn to pieces 
about the person of a literal not a spiritual or moral remedy, 
adhere to the unopened mysteries of man's redemption from evil, 
3 



IS 

and thereby totally defeat the great object. They still unphilo- 
^ophically suppose that belief is in the power of the will, that it 
is man's nature that is evil ; not the conditions under which they 
place him ; and that he is to be set to rights by anathemas, masses 
in Latin or Greek, holy water, confession, penance, absolution? 
and *' persecuting heretics to the death." 

. Instead of purifying the influences, of "teaching all nations," 
of taking "neither purse nor scrip," "loving enemies," "bless- 
ing them that curse," " doing good to them who hate," "praying 
for them who despitefully use and persecute," " of resisting not 
evil," but when "smitten on the right cheek to turn the left 
also," they teach the very reverse by example, they oppose the 
spread of knowledge, school education, and the reading of the 
Bible by the people, as if fully assured of the result of moral 
light. 

In the fifth century, the general stock principle, the very last 
relic of the first Christians, was abrogated, and the immense, ill- 
gotten wealth of the once poor, humble and despised church was 
divided ; as the first principle set out with could not be carried 
out on the aristocratic rule. Despotic swa^ could not exist when 
all men are brethren. Mankind have therefore to be saved from 
" mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abom- 
inations of the earth." Saved from the very means of their pro- 
posed salvation. 

The hatred of the Greek and Latin "Catholic" churches to 
each other exceeds even that of their bitterness to heretics or in-? 
fidels, whom they themselves thus naturally create. Each claims 
to be the only true church, out of which none can be saved ; each 
claims to be the primitive; each to be superior to the other; 
and each claims to be infallible, although widely difierent and 
each changing their tactics and points of faith. For ages they 
have been at war, and are still cutting each other's throats to get 
possession of an old stable at Bethlehem, where shepherds never 
watcned their flocks by night at the winter solstice, or Christmas, 
in which they hold that the Divinity coming in the virgin mind 
was born ; a mount where none exists, on which a purely spiritual 
being was transfixed to a tree witn iron nails in a manner that 



19 

even no semi-barbarong nation ever employed in inflicting capital 
punishment ; and also a cellar underground in vhich they assert 
that intelligence as it comes in the world was buried. In the 
figurative sense this is an undoubted truth. The Gnostics, who 
were the first and only learned Christians, never dreamed of a 
literal rendering of these divine mysteries. 

But were a poet, historian, orator, legislator or philosopher of 
ancient Grreece permitted to behold her now, he would deny his 
country,, degraded, ignorant and perfidious as she has been made 
by the very same mysteries of his day being only understood and 
taught in the vulgar sense. 

Socrates, Plato and iEschylus would now behold the mischief 
that has been brought on the world through resisting their true 
doctrine of the law of mind, which governs the human will in 
every possible or supposable case, according us its states have 
been wrought on ; and Aristotle would now be convinced that he 
was wrong in asserting that the will is free because events in the 
future are contingent, and that he had been the sole cause by 
the "Christian fathers" adopting his false mental impressions, of 
bringing on and continuing the dissensions, strife, sufierings, 
poverty, vice and disease, of the masses of Christendom. 

The republics of Greece would not reduce to practice the true 
doctrine of the will, nor open the mysteries, but persecuted her 
sages, her "heretics" to the death, and arguing right, like the 
Jesuits, from false premises, made reason and logic extinguish 
truth and republicanism together. 

After liberty had thus long been exiled from the world by 
false first facts, she has at length found an asylum on the 
" virgin" soil of America, This modern republic has opened up 
the political mystery of true Christianity, that all men are not 
only oratorically, theoretically, or theologically, but really 
brethren, socially free, and on an equality. Being so, they 
necessarily must have a degree of intelligence, virtue and 
honesty, some mental development and moral culture, because 
Having a voice in making the laws which they must obey ; and 
because democracy can only exist by true mental impressions, 
absence of mystery, and the natural goodness of the people. Such 



2a 

conditions, however, "v^hich are alone the strength and support of 
free institutions, are destruction and death to aristocracies and 
hierarchies. Blind subjection to ecclesiastical sway, hereditary 
bondage, ignorance, poverty, disease, vice and crime are indis- 
pensable to aristocratic vassalage. America, therefore, must, like 
Greece, either throw open the same mysteries in which moral 
truth has been veiled, then as now, by churches without religion, 
religion without^Christ, and Christians without Christianity, or 
sink, like her, to despotic rule, mental night, and blind popular 
subjection ! 

This fact becomes more evident daily, as truth and error are 
now coming to close quarters. Mind, or the bayonet, must now 
rule the world. On every hand is heard the cry, popular sub- 
jection or popular sovereignty. On, Americans, then, in this 
epoch of the world's history depends the ultimate. 

The down-trodden, ''hereditary bondsmen" have fled from the 
legitimate consequences of false first principles to seek under 
new skies new first facts, new homes, but not free minds. Many 
with the mark of " mystery, Babylon" on theu' foreheads, with 
their minds undeveloped, their reason asleep, and early prejudices 
strong, such being the states of mind necessary to false religion 
and despotic rule ; many marked and numbered according to 
caste or birth, are even ready to sell the boon of freedom, not 
even "for a mess of pottage," to dishonest politicians, who 
pander to their former nationahty and religious false impressions, 
or ply them with liquor, and prepared at the mystic sound of a 
bell to erect the blood-stained sign of a persecuting church on 
the top of the stars and stripes. 

A seeret order of monks, the enemies of liberty, who, four 
years ago, put it to the vote to throw open " the mysteries," but 
which was carried in the negative, and who have been plotting 
for generations against political equality and mental freedom 
under the sacred name of Jesus, the moral sun (oh, shame ! 
where is thy blush ?) having been hunted out of Europe, because 
acting out their maxim, that " the end justifies the means," would 
transfer the "holy office" for the sale of indulgences for every 
crime except the use of reason, poison the young mind before it 



21 

comes to understanding, grant absolution for arson and murder, 
and reestablish the inquisition " to persecute heretics to the 
death" on the soil of Washington ; there to enact the same 
scenes of carnage and blood which have deluged the old world for 
ages under the See of Rome. Hence the blind subjection of the 
masses, while it sinks them down to the lowest depths of vassal- 
age, necessarily raises up a ruinous aristocracy. 

The Spaniards brought the inquisition with them to America ; 
it, however, could not live on the soil of the New World. But 
how shall the bringing on again of mental night, the revival of 
the dark ages, and a crusade against liberty in the western hem- 
isphere be averted ? How shall those streams of blood be stayed 
which have flowed through many centuries ? or be kept from flow- 
ing afresh on ground sacred to mental freedom as well as political 
equality ? Only by moral force ; only by opening up the mys- 
teries of ancient Egypt, the natural goodness of man, the neces- 
sary action of the will in every given circumstance, of belief being 
the result of the accident of birth, of early training, or of 
evidence real or seeming, therefore involuntary, and of the evil 
will and the act being in the attendant influences. Only by the 
learning of universities and divinity schools, for the first time in 
the annals of the world, learning to be honest to God and human 
nature ; Americans true to themselves, to liberty and humanity ; 
thereby creating a great light from sound first principles, that 
will lighten this and every land. Such, then, is the mission of 
American democracy to the world. America alone, of all nations 
of God's earth, can afibrd to be honest ; she can afibrd to let 
God's truth and the real nature of man be known. Moral force, 
then, is the word, and " by this sign conquer !" 

Nor could an ancient Roman standing on the banks of the 
Tiber be brought to believe that that was Rome ; and that that 
Vatican was built by the sale of indulgences for, and absolving 
from crimes of drunkenness, robbery, incest, arson and murder, 
for all except the crime of seeking truth ; by stultifying the in- 
tellect and destroying the soul's emotions, by bleeding and weep= 
ing pictures of the Virgin, or by Christ's coat found at Tunis ! 

,But what would he say or think when informed that an old 



ecclesiastic claimed icfallibility, an attribute of God alone ; and 
also demanded soul-allegiance of all God's creatures, because 
*' Leir-at law to Deity, to Divine Intelligence, " Sun of Righteous- 
ness," " Prince of Peace," " whose kingdom is not of this world," 
and whose reign "cometh not with observation," being entirely 
mental. The Emperor of China is only brother to the sun and 
uncle to the moon. 

Would a Cicero, a Caesar, or a Cato not exclaim, "infallible idiot 
of Catholic or universal idiots, wholly unfit for freedom or repub- 
lican government, because persisting," in secula secularum, "to 
a literal reading of signs and symbols, a false interpretation of 
purely spiritual truth hidden under tropes and metaphors, but 
known to us all who were initiated into the mysteries of ancient 
Egypt, Greece and Rome !" 

Here, then, are strong grounds on which to rest the fact that 
evil is not in, nor natural to man, but in the soul-murdering, 
body-torturing system. 

Human infallibility cited Galileo to appear before the "holy 
office," placed him in a dark cell, so that he could not see that 
sun nor those heavenly orbs revolving around him, among whom 
he dared to affirm this earth was one ; made him repeat " the 
seven penitential psalms daily," and to swear on his bended 
knees that this earth did not move, against his inmost convic- 
tions. Human infallibility took more than 200 years to find out 
that it was wrong, and acknowledge the true motions ! How 
long, oh ! how long, will it require to admit the true motions of 
the world of the soul ? 

Human infallibility kindled the flames of Smithfield under the 
frlse impression that, belief was in the power of the will ; 
erected the inquisition, by which Spain was reduced from thirty 
to thirteen millions of inhabitants; issued a hull in the fifteenth 
century for the burning of witches, and did burn 100,000 aged 
females ; sold indulgences for every crime except heresy ; sold 
bulls of composition to keep another's property when stolen ; in- 
flicted penalties on those who dared to dispute the Aristotlean 
philosophy of mental as well as physical nature ; perpetrated Ihe 
massacre of St. Bartholomew; reared the Bastile of France; 



28 

kept back the art of printing ; kept up the spirit of intolerance ; 
issued a bull for the abolition of negro slavery, but never sought 
to free the white slave ; advised Charles X to put down the press ; 
would not allow the Parisians to have a reform " bread-and-wine" 
dinner ; and put a French Republic and the press under a worse 
despotism than France or any other nation ever endured by a 
" darling son" of human infallibility. 

Let, therefore, Americans, whether by birth, adoption, or prin- 
ciple, the world over, the friends of man, of order, of peace prac- 
tice and of political equality, of the democratic form of society, 
enemies of aristocratic wrong, oppression and moral falsehoods, 
unite in one grand public opinion, based on the laws of man's true 
nature and the disclosure of the still hidden sense of genuine 
Christianity, as well as popular sovereignty— employ only moral 
suasion, set the anti-mystic press in motion, flood every land, sea 
and island with mental freedom tracts, then " many will run to 
and fro, and knowledge will be increased." 

To prove further, if any more evidence were wanting, that evil 
is the formation of the dark hour of the existence of the race, of 
reading false the divine order, of denying that there is any fixed 
law guiding the will, of taking ancient literature in a literal sense, 
and supposing that ill exists not ia the conditions but in the man, 
is shown in the fact that as these come to be removtd, evil in the 
same ratio is diminished. In the State of IMaine, and many other 
States of the Union, "infallible" drunkards have "turned from 
the error of their ways." 300,000 Sons of Temperance, by 
simply altering public sentiment, and changing the conditions 
attending the inebriate, and over which he had no control, have 
cheated the workhouses, insane hospitals, criminal law courts, 
jails, penitentiaries, gibbets and the grave out of their "legal" 
prey. 

Not only do "infallible" Catholic impressions, once made on 
the human mind, close up every avenue to true views of the 
divine order, but, by destroying all self-reliance, and leading the 
mind to trust in the power of charms, penances and guardian 
angels, making the sign of the cross, counting beads and wearing 
crucifixes, fill the workhouse-unions, brothels, recorders' courts, 



and crowd the gallows. Among those arrested for crime, false 
swearing, drunkenness, fighting and disturbing the peace in all 
large cities, as New York, Dublin, Liverpool, Glasgow or Lon- 
don, not one in fifty knows the marks in a book, and ninety-nine 
in every hundred make the " cross" his or her mark in signing 
their names; but they all know their "Hail, Mary !" (mystery.) 
In the United States there are eight foreign criminals to one 
native ; and eight foreign paupers receiving aid to one native, in 
proportion to the number of each. 

Moreover, the Irish race are naturally as kind, hospitable, 
generous, brave and disinterested, hard-working and good at 
heart as the Scotch race : they live under the same government, 
and prior to the Reformation the Scotch were Catholic and as 
uneducated. But behold now the vast difference in the criminal 
statistics of the two countries, as given in the Neio Orleans 
Creole : 

Scotland.— Assassinations, - 1 to every 400,000 inhabitants. 
Homicides, - - - 1 " 266,000 « 
Thefts, . - - - 1 " 63,340 

Ireland.— Assassinations, - 1 " 107,000 " 
Homicides, - - - 1 " 46,000 

Thefts, - - - - 1 " 19,000 " 

Thus homicides are six times more numerous in Ireland than 
Scotland, assassinations four times, and thefts three to four times 

Condemnations to death (1804 to 1811)— Scotland, 1 in 257,000 
inhabitants ; Ireland, 1 in 52,900. The condemnations to death 
in Ireland are ten times more numerous than in Scotland, and 
executions three times ; hence, in Scotland one individual is con- 
demded to death in 285 convicted of crime ; in Ireland one indi- 
vidual is condemned to death in 49 convicted of crime. 

Executions (average from 1831 to 1835) — Scotland, one in 
610,000 inhabitants; Ireland, one in 221,000 inhabitants. 

To show, also, that evil is not in the man but in the elements 
imposed on the mind, the Irish Quaker, so called in derision by 
modern Christians, because they wait in peace for " the inspira- 
tion of the Almighty which giveth understanding," who quietly 
suffer, like primitive Christians, the despoiling of their goods by 



>25 

an act-of-parliament religion, and who never will, on any condi- 
tion, take up arms to shed their brother's blood, relying solely 
on the coming power and victory of moral force, pay no priest to 
grant them absolution for crimes they prefer not to commit, or 
to keep them in mental darkness and wedded to evil by going 
through forms, rites, ceremonies and masses in Latin. 

Contrasted with these Quaker Irish, we find the Catholic and 
Protestant Irish composing two-thirds of the British butchers of 
man called " the army," who neither can read nor write, and if 
they ever take the pledge to be sober, never keep it. This is the 
physical force which propagates modern Christianity by the bay- 
onet, rum and opium in India and China, and forms the dead 
weight to keep down liberty at home. 

But we must here close the evidence against the Catholic ele- 
ment of evil with that of the " Rev." M. H. Seymour, who, in his 
report, as given in the Liverpool Qoiirie7\ furnishes a startling 
test of the agency of false mental impressions in the creation of 
evil, according to the different shades of opinion in different 
countries. 

Dividing the population by the number of murders annually, 
the result of his inquiries is, in 

Scotland 2 murders to the million of iniiabitants. 

England 4 " " 

Ireland 19 «' <' 

Belgium 18 " " 

Sardinia 20 '« '* 

Bavaria 30 *' " 

France 31 <' " 

Austria 36 " " 

Tuscany 42 '< " . 

Lombardy 45 " " 

Sicily 90 " " 

Papal States 100 '* " 

Naples 200 " «' 

The doctrine, then, of mental impressions as acting on the 
wall gives us the key to the mystery of the cause of evil ; proves 
that in all countries, as well as " Catholic," the susceptibilities 
of mind are such that it is absolutely impossible for it to resist 
illusions made on it since the hour it first saw the light of day, 
4 



26 

any more tlian if truth liad been presented for its reception ; and 
establishes the fact, that as the instincts are drilled into virtue, 
the intellect illuminated by known truth, the reason called into 
play, and the moral emotions cultivated, crime, vice, sickness and 
poverty disappear. 

We now come to see that human actions, obliquity and disease, 
truth, health and virtue, are governed by fixed laws, and that the 
darker and more false the mental states are kept, the darker and 
blacker the acts. Who, then, are the real murderers ? 

In America, although decidedly Protestant, and less bitter and 
intolerant against dissent ; although reason is not heresy ; and 
although some of her churches have gone ahead so far as to see 
that a literal reading of sacred truth is untenable, leading to 
never-ending dispute, an endless variety of rival sects, and that? 
according to the moral economy, the victim of a false state of 
society will not be consigned to an eternity of objectless disci- 
pline : yet concerning a remedy for human ill, the means by which 
humanity is to be delivered from sin, misery and sorrow, of the 
real nature of man, the law of belief, the necessary action of the 
will and the influence of attending conditions, they prefer man- 
made creeds to God-made laws, know as much of the true science 
of human nature as South Sea Islanders, are walking still in the 
dark, still "in the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity." 

Calvin justly saw in mystic truth that freedom of will had no 
share in man's deliverance from evil, but he did not see that 
*'men were as trees walking," or that such a philosophical error 
had no relation in forming human action except as an illusion 
leading to the production of human misery and suffering : conse- 
quently he had his bosom friend Servetus burnt at the stake by 
disclosing private correspondence on polemical divinity, although 
this same Servetus was the first who broached the idea of the cir- 
lation of the blood, which was afterwards discovered by Harvey. 
Truth, however, had to come in the world through sufi'ering. 

Edwards, America's greatest theologian, nobly contends for 
the true doctrine of the will in man's restoration, but confines 
it to the mystic sense, to the divine decrees, and to scenes beyond 
the grave. Hence; in as far as this truth relates to human phe- 



27 

nomena lie is not nearer to the glorious consequences flowing from 
it than the Brahmins of India or a Mahommetan mufti. They 
hold that all things are pre-ordered, but fall short in perceiving, 
like modern theologians, that man's province is to work accord- 
ing to the fixed laws and to use the means for the attainment of 
the end, leaving the divine decrees and first causes to the 
Supreme Ruler ; and fail to perceive that as man comes to square 
his thoughts, language and action with the fixed law of the 
human will, in the same ratio will the world be saved. 

It is, therefore, not religion that man disbelieves, doubts, or 
rejects, or the world despises, but the want of it. The world's 
teachers have never understood it themselves, and hence have 
failed to make it intelligible to others — failed to make it the 
means of man's redemption from evil. Hence Dwight's " body 
of Divinity" is a body without a soul. 

Although boasting of Bible light, yet even to Protestants it is 
still a "sealed book;" they "know not what manner of spirit 
they are of;" although under the impress that they worship the 
Divine Ruler, yet they are falling down before an idol of their 
divinity schools, of their own imagination, of ancient Egypt, 
Ohaldea, Judea, Greece and Rome, and which idol, because not 
the Divine soul of the universe, caused the misery, war, and final 
overthrow of those countries, is working all the evil at the 
present, and will bring on the ruin and overthrow of every 
modern nation. Hence they are always going to be, but never 
blessed ; they are lashed hands and feet, interests, instincts, in- 
tellect and moral feeliug to the car of the European Juggernaut, 
which crushes yearly its thousands in debt, penury, disease, war 
and death ; still " laying up treasures where thieves break 
through and steal," still tied to the aristocratic form of religion 
and social practice, at war with truth as with genuine Christianity, 
which is a peace democracy, a republic in deed and in truth, a 
heaven on earth. 

For nearly 200 years they have been teaching for divinity 
what they know not themselves, never can explain, understand, 
or agree in any more than the "infallible" councils of the 
Churches of Greece or Rome, or render efficient for the end pro- 



posed, and are thereby making yearly more infidels than the 
writings of Paine or Voltaire. They have never as yet ceased to 
libel God's highest work, the human soul, even an admitted por- 
tion of Divinity ; nor ceased to abuse persons who cannot see 
with their spectacles ; never ceased to pray to God to 
alter the fixed laws of mind, to violate the eternal laws of order 
throughout the universe, rather than that they would bestir them- 
selves to fall in with the moral economy, or even strive to know 
what that economy is. They are therefore wedded to their idols, 
are weeping over the effects and shutting their eyes to the causes, 
and daily copying European ethics and manners, the very anti- 
podes of Christianity. 

To prove that they are mistaken about the mode and means of 
human restoration, nor know *' the mystery which has been hid 
from the foundations of the world," truth in unity has not been 
made to appear, physical as well as moral evil is still evolved out of 
the laws of good, and made to prevail in this as in other countries, 
dissent, ignorance, fanaticism, destitution, vice, disease, insanity 
and crime are in the ascendant, taxation and corporate debts are 
coming on apace, the elements of foreign and even civil war are 
busy at work, workhouses, houses of refuge, hospitals and asy- 
lums are daily becoming more in demand, and jails, penitentaries 
and gibbets are filling up fast for a new country. The police are 
coming into fashion a la Europe, and a standing army will soon 
be wanted. According to Livingston's Law Register for 1852, 
the Christians of theses United States pay thirty-six millions of 
dollars to twenty-five thousand lawyers, besides costs of court ; 
while the Jews settle their affairs by a reference to their Rabbis, 
without costing them a cent. If all " these things are done in 
the green tree, what will be done in the dry F" 

As it cannot be for a moment admitted that the means and 
laws placed at man's disposal by Divine wisdom are not adequate 
to accomplish the end, it is therefore certain that those ills exist 
in and are rampant from the undetected load of error in the 
nioral impressions still held sacred. Instead, then, of dreaming 
about a change in man's nature, and invoking the Divinity to 
niter the laws of the universe at their dictation, those ills must 



29 

alone be got over and exterminated by opening up those sealed 
truths, changing their own ideas, purifying the conditions, and 
invoking themselves to form their views and actions in agreement 
with those laws. In the physical and moral world, the Divinity 
and all things stand ready at any moment to receive the wan- 
derer as soon as he will accept the terms. 

The knowledge of a cause is half a cure. It is therefore neces- 
sary to see and be fully conversant with the true origin of the 
ills and frailties hitherto deemed, on the long received first facts, 
inseparable from human nature. We have thus tracked evil by 
its footprints^in blood up to its lair in the dark dens of false rea- 
soning and theory ; and not to the haunts of vice, the cabins of 
penury, or to humanity in rags, filth, disease and untaught igno- 
rance. The great battle of the human race assumes now the 
character of a war of first principles against learned ignorance 
and mere assumption. By the human understanding being able 
to settle in this century the grounds of a system of moral truth, 
man, the world over, will be saved ages of evil and physical force. 
Even "this generation shall not pass away until all things are 
fulfilled." 

But if the soul of man is naturally good, an emanation from, 
and lives, moves, and has its being in the Divinity, how comes it 
that that soul is prone to evil and the body liable at every moment 
to sickness, disease and death ? The answer is plain and simple. 
From false mental impressions, the mistakes of the philosopher, 
the unopened mysteries of sacred truth, religion run mad, and 
aristocracy triumphant. 

^We now, therefore, have to state briefly how these become the 
cause, and how the cause works in the production of physical and 
moral evil. 

All the forces in man are balanced fair by a hand and an in- 
telligence whom none can doubt or deny, except those who have 
studied God and man on the Egyptian model for the vulgar 
masses. There are in man no bad qualities, conflicting princi- 
ples, evil propensities, or sickly tendencies apart from social im- 
post or given habitudes. There are not too many or too few men- 
tal or bodily functions ; there is not too much, any very high, low, 



30 

bad, or " royal" blood; nor is there too little or too large a share 
of electric fluid to act on the nerves at the bidding of the will, in 
order to control the muscles and set in motion the wonderful 
mechanism of the body. All are needed to enable the individual 
to desire, to seek and attain well-being, as well as the preserva- 
tion and happiness of the race. If any of these are wrong, then 
the Divine Author must be at fault, not man. 

But it is the derangement, misdirection, and abuse of the in- 
stinctive powers, the knowledge faculties, the virtuous emotions 
and vital forces, by conventional error and wrong motives, which 
bring on and conserve Egyptian darkness, and thus cause vice, 
disease and crime. When, then, a false impress is made on the 
mind, the highest, most susceptible, and most tenacious powers 
are the first to be affected. The lower or animal powers are 
roused to action, and chiefly exercised ; while the intellectual and 
moral are either put to sleep or subverted. Great excitement 
then takes place, and the mind is thrown out of balance by the 
ascendancy of the inferior, and subserviency t@ them, of the supe- 
rior. In this state the mind sees things inverted, the reverse of 
the truth, things not to be seen, which neither have nor can have 
an existence in the sense contended for. While, however, the 
mind is laboring under the counterfeit idea, the illusion appears 
as if it actually existed, that it really sees it, as in cases of delirium 
tremens, hypochondria, or lunacy, and therefore is led to act 
accordingly. 

Reason, conscientiousness and kind feeling are paralyzed. The 
mind says to itself, unconscious of the true nature and tendency 
of action, with Milton's devil, " evil be thou my good." As the 
storm rages within, blind passion usurps the reins, wrong is taken 
for rifijht, the mental powers are hurried on without being allowed 
time to think that there is another side to the question, or that 
another view might be better. The mind is now made up, the 
will then acts on the electricity of the nerves, the nerves contract 
the muscles, the muscles set the bodily functions in motion, and 
an evil action is produced to work its way in effecting individual 
and social misery. Such, then, is the birth of moral evil. 

This state or habit of soul is indexed by the countenance, the 



31 

eye, the brow, the mouth, voice, and even gait. The physiog- 
nomy takes the aspect of the animal whose characteristic is in- 
dulged in by the mind. Blind subjection to human " infallibility" 
or aristocracy gives the outline of the sheep ; avarice the Israel- 
itish outline of the goat; cunning, the fox; drunkenness, the 
sow ; rage, the lion ; fighting, the bull ; murder, the tiger, &c. 

To make matters worse, and drive a fearful trade in human 
woe by keeping out the light and retaining wrong influences, 
society, under an impression equally false and fatal, supposes 
that man is capable of willing a different or a better act at the 
time, the induced states of his mind and external causes being 
the same ; consequently, to effect a cure of a moral disease, he is 
assailed and held to answer for acting as he does, when it is thus 
rendered physically and morally impossible for him, laboring 
under socially imposed error, mental disease, wrong direction and 
habitudes, (a state of mind certainly not his fault but his misfor- 
tune,) to have done otherwise. Instead, therefore, of looking, like 
the good Samaritan, on him as having fallen among thieves, "the 
priest and the Levite pass him by on the other side;" instead of 
viewing him as only a fit subject for the keenest sympathy, in the 
same way as laboring under bodily disease, requiring kind treat- 
ment to bring about a change in his mind's states, and effect a 
cure by an alteration in attending agency, "he is taken from 
prison and from judgment," "led as a lamb to the slaughter," 
made the scapegoat of the errors, neglect, short-comings and sins 
of the community, and is sacrificed on the altar of a false state of 
associated man, an ignorant victim of the wrong theory of divinity 
schools.' It is thus made expedient that " one should die for the 
people." 

At this door, then, in the invisible or soul's world, all the furies 
rush in, curse the visible, and render this fair earth a pan- 
demonium. 

Having made this breach in the moral world, the whole spawn 
of non-productive laborers enter, first begging the truth of their 
organic principles, that man is naturally bad, that action and 
belief are in the power of the will, that he could not be brought 
to allow the fruits of the earth to ripen, to have a due regard to 



life and property, to respect the rights of industry, nor be stimu- 
lated to labor except by actual want. They then beg to be permitted 
to set mankind to rights by teaching the still occult science of 
moral truth in the ancient form of hieroglyphics, so that they 
have ears but hear not ; eyes they have but see not things as they 
really are ; thej go for a half or a whole century regularly to 
church but at the end know just as much as when they entered ; 
those who can read cannot perceive the true sense of the figura- 
tive style of Egyptian writings ; " neither can they understand 
the things that belong to their peace, until they are for ever hid 
from their eyes." 

When, however, they have obtained the unsuspecting confid- 
ence of the people — when they have become firmly seated in the 
general [mind, and taught it to believe that it is impossible in 
the nature of things to do without them, or to exist in any degree 
of order without their still unexplained views, then their mendi- 
cant petitions are changed to the most extravagant demands. 
Those bubbles of the hour of darkness toil not, neither do they 
spin ; they monopolise the natural homes of God's offspring, eat 
up their substance, " fare sumptuously every day," and " load 
men with burdens grievous to be borne, which they themselves 
touch not with one of their fingers." 

For the defence of this state of affairs, the aristocrat and hier- 
arch, aware of the absence of all moral force, rely on the blind 
submission of the ignorant to mystery, of the interested to means 
of enriching themselves, but more particularly on the police, mili- 
tary, lawyers, judges, hangmen, demons, angels, witches, evil 
spirits, criminals and fanatics. 

In their train follow the spectres of intolerance, want of self- 
reliance, poverty, yice, pestilence, famine, war and crime, the 
ruin of families, communities, cities and nations. In every age 
and clime their presence is marked by God's earth being studded 
with barracks, law-courts, jails and gibbets, St. Giles' and Five 
Points, houses of refuge, workhouses, hospitals and asylums. 

On an altar reared to a mistaken God, they thus sacrifice intel- 
ligence coming in humanity afresh, and put (him) it to an open 
shame } they people God's universe and man's head with unreal 



33 

evil beings, and earth with their real victims. From the sacred 
desk they still proclaim the earth, air and sea in the day time, 
but more particularly at night, to be filled with an actual, a 
personal devil, angels, fiends, ghosts, &c. 

Even after the voluntary and involvntary powers are tired out 
by pain, sorrow and sufiering, and at length seek rest in a change 
of form, after the body has returned to the bosom of mother earth, 
and " the soul to God who gave it," they attempt to draw aside 
the curtain of that "bourne from whence no traveller returns," 
and depict in lurid flames, the chains of adamant and the bottom- 
less pit of this free-will doctrine. 

Moral evil, therefore, originates in false views of truth. The 
best proof of this is the unblest condition of man in those coun- 
tries longest under their rule ; and where they have had all their 
own way for centuries. Man's course of action depends on the 
states of his mind, which necessarily make up the will, and those 
states themselves are again made up by the world's impression on 
them. 

Throughout the unhappy past, the man who would rise in the 
world has been led to look with hope and seek the bliss of being, 
the happy balance of the mind's povfers, in the misery, ignorance, 
poverty, degradation, vice and crime of the masses, and, on these 
grounds thus brought on, to deny them the conditions to health 
and virtue ; then to accuse and punish them for being made evil.' 
Under the bewitchments of wealth, power, fame, military glory, 
rank and pleasure, happiness has eluded his utmost search. 
Even vice and crime have charms to the lower stages of mentality^ 
.But never can the mind find rest, the body health, commu- 
nities prosperity, nor society peace under the theory of a free 
will, the Gospel kept a mystery. Catholic confessionals, or on 
aristocratic first principles ! 

Not only do illusory ideas, thus imposed, invert and misdirect 
the mind's powers, so that it necessarily determines wrong and 
chooses evil in mistake for good; but by the perturbation and 
confliction of the laws which those powers must obey, the unnatu- 
ral state into which it is thrown, and the unruly passions under 
which it labors, and which gradually become worse from habit, 
5 



34 

the electricity of the system is forced out of the health equilib- 
rium, the blood is arrested in its timely circuit to the lungs, there 
to receive the oxygen and electricity of the atmosphere, which 
keeps it from putrefaction. The electric fluid then forsakes the 
feet, hands and skin, and makes for its home in the brain, the 
blood hastens after, and the excess of both settles down on the 
weakest organ. This part immediately becomes diseased, and 
pain is then and there born into the world. Even without any 
external physical cause bodily evil is thus engendered. 

While the mind is denied true views of things, through the 
world's false system, it is and must be restless, dissatisfied with 
itself, with every one and every thing ; even it murmurs at the 
divine order and the welfare of others. In this predicament the 
individual complains of cold, heat, of wet, dry ; chides and finds 
fault, until sickness fastens on the J)art least able to resist, and 
disease is produced without knowing how. 

Not only have false ideas slaughtered thousands in war through 
every age ; in law legally murdered hundred of thousands for 
being just what they were made ; and in what was passed off at 
the time for religion ten thousand times ten thousand. But 
millions closed their eyes on this world because their mental 
powers were never brought to a balance ; they were therefore un- 
able to see that everything is for the best, "that a sparrow falleth 
not to the ground without their heavenly Father," and that 
human ill is only destined to bring on the moral day. Unable to 
support the common load of humanity, evil tidings, disappoint- 
ments, excessive toil, misfortunes, ingratitude, anxiety, sorrow, 
melancholy, fanaticism, or supposed spirit intercourse, pressed 
heavily on their souls, the vital forces are arrested, disease quickly 
sets in, and, like as to the lamma of Thibet when ill-treated, death 
comes to their relief. 

When the head is the feeblest organ, then the undue propor- 
tion of the nervous fluid and blood thus called there causes mo- 
nomania, vertigo, fits, and even insanity, according to the degree 
of virulence in the conditions. But if the head is able to resist 
this combined actioa, then the heart is assailed, and if it is found 
to be the weaker, then a disease of the heart ensues. If the 



35 

heart can ward it off, then the liver is attacked, and the liver 
complaint is brought on. Should the liver stand the ordeal, then 
the lungs are taken ; this is consumption. If, however, the lungs 
are sound and strong, those vital forces make for the stomach; 
here they create dyspepsia. 

But when the false mental impression causes the electric fluid, 
to fall back of a sudden on the stomach and bowels, from being 
driven from the feet and surface, the pores of the skin are clos ed 
the arterial and venous blood and the other fluids retreat inter- 
nally, large secretions follow ; fever and inflammation take place 
in the alimentary canal, thereby increasing the obstruction in 
the circulation and debility in the system. Fearful cramps, con- 
vulsions and discharges follow, the whole body, with its covering, 
the skin, seems to cave in — it is the cholera morbus. 

When, however, this fluid is disturbed from wrong emotions, 
as passion, fear and excitement of mind, proceeding from false 
ideas, in a climate and at a season of the year when carbonic and 
ammoniacal gases exist in abundance in the atmosphere, the body 
is rendered negative to surrounding sickly conditions, the blood 
is deprived of the necessary supply of oxygen, pain in the head, 
back and limbs are felt. This is followed by an engorgement of 
the gastro-intestinal mucous membrane, the liver, spleen, kid- 
neys and brain, a slow circulation of altered blood, and an arrest 
of all the important secretions, with a tendency to crisis by 
hemorrhage and black vomit. It is yellow fever. Fever and 
ague, and other fevers, dysentery, inflammation, pleurisy, spinal 
afiection, disease of the joints, bones, &c., flow from, or are in 
like manner caused by erroneous notions of moral truth, imposed 
by the world teachers. 

Those diseases arising from false mental impressions are 
brought on by that half or portion of the electric fluid under the 
command of the will, as the mind's states come to be affected, 
and as such admit of the best mode of cure, that of prevention* 
But if once produced, the vital force has to be brought to the 
health balance in effecting a remedy. Besides those causes of 
disease, there are others originating in physical or injurious ex- 
ternal impressions, and are produced by the other half of the 



86 

electric fluid, over wMcli the mind has no direct control. They 
are therefore said to be involuntary. The physical origin of dis- 
ease is, in like manner, whatever affects the body, so as to throw 
the electric fluid out of the equilibrium necessary to health. 
Hence by knowing and avoiding the exciting causes which act on 
the bodily states so as to bring on sickness, we can act indirectly 
in order to ward off those agencies, or to find a remedy in restor- 
ing the natural equilibrium. 

Instead, then, of the Divinity afflicting mankind with infirmi- 
ties and mental and bodily ailments, it is man alone, who by cling- 
ing to moral fallacies, and by living in direct opposition to the 
divine laws written on his nature by a kind, benevolent, and infi- 
nitely wise Father, brings on and propagates those ills. 

Among those external causes or physical impressions which 
disturb the health-power, as man by his action may determine, 
may be enumerated that of eating unwholesome, or too much of 
even wholesome food, being deprived of the necessary sustenance, 
or partaking of the adulterated articles of commerce, drinking 
spirituous liquors, want of regular exercise, pure air and bathing. 
Sudden change or exposure to a cold and damp atmosphere, 
lying or falling asleep on the ground, sitting with the back to a 
current of air when perspiring, a cold seat, a drink of very cold 
water when warm, the head uncovered under a hot sun, 
bathing when heated, change of climate, living in a low and 
swampy locality, or on the side of a street or mountain not visited 
by the sun's rays, may all impel the life fluid from the extremi- 
ties and surface of the body, the blood retreating with it, and 
by settling on the weakest organ induce disease, the same as 
when under mental illusions. Smoking, or even drinking strong 
tea, in time may produce paralysis. 

Being born of parents, also, who are blood relations, or of 
those who either or both are inebriates, or living in violation of 
the laws of health or virtue. It takes three generations of one 
or other of the parents living in the practice of vice to confirm 
a disease in a family ; and it requires three generations of those 
marrying healthy persons and living in the observance of those 
laws t@ work a disease out. 



37 

Disease is thus proved incontestibly not to be natural to man 
any more than to plants or the lower animals, but forms the ex- 
ception ; that it arises from the imposed derangement of the 
nature, and that there exists a power in nature herself to react 
and restore the vital stream to healthy action. Even all that is 
effected in allaying suffering and bringing about a cure is effected 
through a strong belief, the chemical action of medicine on the 
involuntary powers, and an absolute will in assisting nature to 
establish the true or natural state of the system. 

Disease is therefore no more native to the body than false 
ideas are native to the mind ; nor are afflictions from God but of 
and from man. Pain of mind is generated by an order of society 
reared on false first facts, or a poisoned moral atmosphere, 
through which the mental powers are never brought or allowed 
to come to the true or natural balance ; and pain of the body is 
caused by the negative electricity attracting the blood to the im- 
paired organ, thereby bringing on inflammation ; or it is incurred 
by positive electricity repelling the blood from the organ, which, 
although equally severe, is never attended by inflammation ; or it 
is evolved through a union of the two states of the electric force^ 
then it is felt as a strong burning sensation. 

Evil, then, is nothing more or less than error in theory, a 
phantom, or "the devil," of which humanity is made the expo- 
nent ; or as it expresses its state in feeling, look, language and 
action, and as such, is curable. Goodness, health, sight to the 
blind, hearing to the deaf, the opening of the prison doors to 
them that are bound, but Intelligence coming in the world, born 
of the virgin mind through suffering ; Deity expressed in feeling, 
look, language and action, " God manifest in the flesh." 

The united efforts of all epochs of the world, sects and nations 
have been directed towards the solving of this mystery of evil, 
and finding a remedy for the ills of life. How they have suc- 
ceeded is still written in blood. Human ill never can be cured 
by physical force, but by the rise of the true moral sxm. Even a 
drop of cold water, or " clay of spittle," aided by the power of 
belief and an absolute will, may work miracles in healing " all 
manner of diseases." 



38 

Theories, creeds, systems, literal readings and governments of 
physical force have long been tried and failed. With thrice the 
expenditure, three times the misery, and three times the force 
they must fail. The war of first principles waxes every day 
thicker and hotter : it is the battle between the supposed order 
of man and the eternal order of God. Which shall triumph 
cannot any longer be a matter of doubt. The question is now 
reduced to the direct ratio of days. What nation, amidst the 
wreck of dynasties, will suspend its minor differences, and "bury 
the hatchet," until the victory is proclaimed on the side of long- 
hidden truth, open "the mysteries hid from the foundation of the 
world," and only for once — for the first time in the authentic 
history of our globe, try moral force ? What country shall first 
obtain the true response from the soul of man ? 

Human hope, man's last breath, his dying sigh and the sacred 
oracles translated, point to suffering humanity, and say, " Behold 
the man," the true or spiritual " lamb of God, which taketh 
away the sins of the world." Then "there shall be no more 
death (moral), neither sorrow nor crying ; neither shall there be 
any more pain, for the former things are passed away." 



39 



CHAPTER 11. 
THAT MAN HAS NOT AHEIVED AT HIS TRUE 

STATE. 

Every form of life is endowed witli faculties suited to its 
nature and wonderfully adapted to procure its well-being. It is 
evidently placed by an unerring, although unseen hand in the 
very locality and surrounded by the very elements required for 
its existence and thrift. Its susceptibilities and properties are 
adjusted with consummate skill to the climate and mode of life. 
It has but to reach forth and partake of the enjoyment thus 
placed within its reach. 

That every form of life attains its true state, its acme in the 
scale of being, is equally apparent ; except the head of organized 
existence. With capabilities and a nature of a far higher order 
— with characteristics marking him out as designed for some 
great end — mih the accumulated observation and experience of 
past ages before him — he is still unblessed ! 

It cannot be deemed possible that the Power which " tempers 
the wind to the shorn lamb," has bestowed such rare gifts only 
to make him the most diseased, vicious and unhappy of all that 
lives ; only to add poignancy to misery ; to make him feel his 
distress, and to blindfold his eyes to any and every means of 
deliverance. Feather is it not certain that such a state is but his 
first unfolding, his abasement prior to his rise ? 

There is evidently something on his part to be performed, 
some pre-requisite left for him to supply by the force of his in- 
herent mental power. Here there is an ''if" — if he could but see — 
only get once a glimpse of things as they are in themselves, 
behold himself apart from agencies made a portion of his being 
from the association of ideas in the mind ; if it could be said of 
him, ''and there fell from his eyes, as it had been scales," then 
he could gain his true place in the scale of happy being, and 
make good his enlargement from conventional illusion. 



40 

From the disagreement of man's state with his nature, the dis- 
parity between his hopes and the reality, the confliction of those 
wise and beneficent rules of action in his conformation and the 
unintellectual and sorry figure he has been made to exhibit in the 
part, it is indisputable that his moral guides have made a false 
start, have set out wrong. Bitter dissent, resistance and blood, 
tears and sufiering have marked every foot of the way. We 
therefore have never had a fair representation of the reality — 
never as yet seen man; but only a grotesque anomaly, a poor, in- 
fatuated caricature, playing many parts, but never appearing in 
his own ; a mere embodiment of ancient opinion. 

Had the authors of this pitiable state of human life, this tragic 
farce of man, ever guessed anything near the truth, had they ever 
caught a just view of the divine laws which guide the motions of 
the world cf the soul, in like manner as the naturalist has at 
length obtained of the true motions of external nature, then man 
might have been enabled to appear in i^ropria persona. Had 
they considered him apart from the occasional qualities which 
he could not help contracting from proximity to their cause, 
taken the Gospel view of his nature divested of mystery, or 
studied man as he is in himself, then we might have had some 
just idea of the original, of this admitted master-piece of Creative 
Power, this epitome, this wonder of the universe ! 

As it is, however, little else has been allowed to appear on 
the stage except s, frightful phantom of scholastic imagination and 
failure. Hence it comes, that by admitting the first principles of 
the world's teachers as true, which are neither self-evident nor 
can be proved, but which are evidently self-contradictory, human 
frailty, ailments and degeneracy seem indigenous, and social dis- 
order to be incurable. But the moment we come to look on the 
other and bright side of this momentous question, take a daylight 
view of this walking miracle of sensation and thought, we are 
induced to believe that they may have been mistaken, rather than 
conclude that Divine Power should have produced a monster, and 
wisdom infinite should be found at fault. 

Can there, then, be no other reason assigned for the divided 
and deranged state and unhappy condition of mortals than that 



41 

a philosoplier, the founder of the iDeripatetie Sect many hundred 
years since, said so and so relative to the laws of mind ; or that 
the "Christian fathers" took their notions of the human soul 
from him, a pagan Greek, an aristocratic pedagogue, the recreant 
disciple of such philosophers as Socrates and Plato ? None 
whatever. 

As the laborers in this most important field cannot therefore 
claim any exemption from the errors common to the early stages 
of science, the ideas and state of man not being nearer even yet 
to an agreement with his nature, wrong conceptions of great mag- 
nitude being constantly found out, no system or doctrine settled, 
nor the system ever having worked well, it must be admitted that 
the truth of his abstractions has not been m.ade to appear. 

Are mankind divided in moral sentiment, at strife, and even 
war among themselves ? Do net the worst forms of human sacri- 
fices, heathenish ignorance, bad culture, beggary, prostitution, 
disease and crime hold their levee night and day in sight of the 
palace ; within the sound of the bells, and even within the shadow 
of the temple ; the purlieus of the university and the precincts of 
law ; aye, even at the gallow's foot ? Are the sword and the 
spear not yet transformed into the implements of husbandry ; nor 
fierce animal natures dwelling in peace and aifection with the 
tame and gentle ; nor yet peace on earth or good will towards 
man ? 

As the states of mankind, of the same race and nature, are 
found to vary precisely as the agencies brought to bear on them, 
or as those states come near to the fixed laws, it is therefore 
placed beyond a doubt that the world's evil state is the solo work 
of the *' fathers," through their adoption of the false organic 
views of the Stagirite, instead of the first facts and theory of the 
Gospel opened. For proof of this it may be instanced that in 
Europe, a nation with thirty millions of people, a state church, a 
shackled press and aristocratic views of man, requires some hun- 
dreds of thousands of a standing force, while in these United 
States, with about the same number, without a state paid church, 
with a free press and democratic principles, every freeman's 
bared breast is a standing force. Therefore no other standing 
6 



42 

army is required, unless the same learned fallacies shall spread 
their frightful contagion in the western hemisphere. 

Man is, therefore, just so far from his true state as he is from 
goodness and well being, good will, agreement and health; and 
his first principles just so far from truth. 

Instead, then, of man being the vestige of a fall, we find only 
that the wrecks of a mistaken, of a fallen system have left deep 
marks on his soul. No ! his nature still retains its original 
metal. He is ever as true as steel to the impressions awoke 
within. That he is always as the conditions brought to bear 
on him is written in letters of his blood in every clim-e and on 
every sea. 

Nearly three hundred years ago men of mind got tired and 
disgusted with the mere authority of names, old traditions, and 
only studying nature in the closet or cloister, threw aside the 
syllogistic art, then viewed as the only inlet to knowledge, dis- 
carded the assumptions of the schools of learning relative to phy= 
sical science, adopted the inductive mode of rising from particular 
facts to the theory, and behold the result ! The aspect of exter- 
nal nature has been entirely changed, the peripatetic theory 
exploded, the masses have been initiated into the mysteries of 
physical science, miracles have been performed, great physical 
advantages have been obtained, and the earth itself has put on 
an entirely different appearance. All seems changed except the 
wavwardness and wretchedness of man. 



43 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ACTUAL AND VISIBLE WORLD OF HUMAN 

LIFE THE FAC-SIMILE OF THE IDEAL. 

As man thinks so is he. In the ratio that he recedes from the 
established order, he in the same degree partakes of the fruit of 
his temerity ; and as he nears that order he in the same propor- 
tion purchases immunity from every evil and brings down 
heaven's choicest blessings on his head. His mind's conceptions 
of that order, however, are made up of not what is, but what 
appears to him true. In this grave truth we have the who'e 
secret of his unblest state and also the mystery of his enlarge- 
ment. 

But it is not by the exercise of one faculty alone, nor even to 
the combined action of the whole of his powers together, that he 
can ever attain to just views of the fixed order. It is not by 
drawing on another world to correct the errors of this, as such a 
cure is worse than the disease ; and besides every department of 
universal being is governed by laws belonging to or within 
itself. His rise, therefore, to the true sphere of his nature, 
the correction of his ideal vision is therefore through the 
accumulated experience and observation, the sufi*erings and death 
of those of his species who have lived before and traveled the 
same journey. 

The sense of sight does not give us the idea of distance ; nor 
could we tell whether objects are within or without us unless in- 
formed of their true locality by the sense of touch, and even then 
we have to acquire the habit of referring them to an external 
world. Our first conceptions of the motions of the sun and stars 
are the reverse of the truth. The banks of a stream appear to 
be moving rapidly up while it is ourselves that are sailing down. 
The movements of human beings, also, seem to be under indivi- 
dual direction, and as arising primarily from their own will and 
nature. It is therefore the province of the other senses, reflec- 



44 

tion and continued observation, to correct the false ideal thus 
prematurely formed. 

Nevertheless, mankind may receiye as true, long retain, and 
*' thrust themselves through with many sorrows," by h6lding on 
to like illusions of mind. All ages of the world, nations, and 
people form their visible state out of the ideal. The actual 
world is in this way a correct daguerreotype of the invisible state 
cf their souls. If, then, the world of life and sensation is over= 
run with ills, the world of mind is overgrown with weeds, the sun 
of the soul is under a dark cloud, and frightful images of nothing 
are flitting about in man's bewildered imagination. Those extra- 
neous impressions, unknown and unrecognized in God's world, 
are inflictins: all the ills that flesh seems heir to. The cure has 
therefore to be sought in their correction ; not through address- 
ing the fears and feelings by imposing additional sufierings, dis- 
tant terrors or physical agencies acting on a moral nature. 

First impressions, or the early ideal, have been universally 
mere hypothesis, which time and experience have to correct. 
The world's learning, therefore, is very aptly compared to a ser= 
pent ; truth as it is born of the virgin mind is sublimely expressed 
as the Divinity coming on the earth to redeem man from the 
power of error and every evil; and another world refers solely 
to the altered state of human life this side the grave by the rise 
of mental illumination. 

To the conception of the moral reasoner, " the issues of life" 
are therefore due. To the ideal vision he has formed of human 
nature, not as it is in itself but as he interprets it, are to be re= 
ferred the varied states of the general mind, and consequently all 
hue an phenomena. If the actual world of life is torn by secta- 
rian dissent, attended by diseased or depraved action, it follows 
that it is his elements that are false — his antecedents that are the 
causes of such penicious consequents. He however puts in a plea 
that he is laboring under fearful odds both in the visible and in- 
visible ; that to the innate depravity of an admitted emanation 
from the Divine Mind are added sata^nic influences. 

But the republics of Greece, prior to the subversion of liberty, 
conceived a far more consistent and superior ideal view of man. 



45 

Instead of libelling the human soul and thwarting nature, they 
cultivated the being called man both physically and mentally. 
Nor did they fail in producing such perfect models of physical 
symmetry, as well as of such intellectual greatness, as no nation haS 
since produced. They fell because they could see no further into 
the pure ideal. 

To the plea, then, of natural obliquity or supernatural agency 
is opposed the fact that those disappear as they cease to be 
believed in, or as they are taken out of the ideal. 

Under military despotism and popular subjection to ecclesias- 
tical sway, beings are invoked into life wearing indeed the out- 
ward form of humanity, but as the moral teacher breathes on 
them the spirit of evil, and imposes on them a character the very 
reverse of their soul's true nature, they become expert actors in 
the fearful parts which he has assigned to and fitted them for. 
Buc he forgot to make himself acquainted with a spell by which 
they might be again laid or controlled, he is therefore laid under 
the necessity to strangle the work of his own hands out of exist- 
ence, as being too horrible to live. Hence these victims become 
the vicarious sufferers to save those coming after from like errors 
and sins. 

Here, then, in the ideal we have the cause of every expression 
of countenance ; the accents of every tongue; the light as it 
beams from every eye ; the spirit that is awoke in every soul and 
the quality of every deed. 

Here may be distinctly seen by the mind, through the light of 
the stake-fires and the flames of the bottomless pit, the rack of 
the inquisition, the inebriate's cup, the torch of the incendiary, 
the dagger of the assassin, the pistol of the duellist, the war- 
drum, the very knife that shall mangle a human throat, even of 
one's self-=the identical rope as it keeps dangling from the 
gibbet and looms around the cradle-head of that sleeping innocent, 
from which to him escape is impossible. 

Here may be visible in the false ideal the ignorant, the maniac, 
the idiot, the destitute, the ill-tempered, revengeful, vicious, dis- 
eased and criminal. Then in this tragic farce come running the 
police, the military, the jurist, clergy and hangman, to cure the 



46 

evils they cause.' But, alas! those horrors are for ever passed 
beyond the reach of cure, far beyond their depth, by jails, peni- 
tentiaries and gibbets, workhouses, asylums and houses of refuge. 

Analyze any case, trace it up from the immediate to the pri- 
mary cause, to its birth in man's misconceptions of the moral 
order, and it will be found to arise from not seeing into the true 
ideal and denying the true motions of the soul's world The 
yery actors, the scene, the spectators, the instrument, the place, 
and the very moment the deed takes place are all there, darkly 
awaiting the hour of denoument. 

If, then, distress, disease, and ill in any form fall to our lot ; 
if friends forsake, those whom we have benefited prove ungrate- 
ful, vice overcome the young, and premature demise deprive us of 
those who seemed like a portion of our very souls, the source is 
in the false ideal. If private misunderstanding, domestic or social 
feuds, civil convulsions or open war disturb our peace ; if constant 
or transient clouds obscure our path, if unhappy feelings cling to 
every effort, if a pang cross the current of tranquil thought, even 
in a dream, the cause is to be found in the elements of a mistaken 
theory of man. 



47 



CHAPTER IV, 
INTELLIGIBLE FIRST FACTS NECESSARY. 

Every science or art is established on certain fixed viewb, 
agreeing with the order of nature, termed first principles. 
Without those primary truths being settled in, by having ap- 
proved themselves to the human understanding, the sciences never 
could have acquired consistency, or arisen to any distinction ; 
nor art been ever known to the world ; and mankind must have 
remained in a state of barbarism little removed from mere 
animals. 

It is from this certainty and unanimity relative to the organic 
principles that the moderns have carried the natural sciences and 
mechanics to such a degree of greatness, have evoked such 
undreamed-of benefits on the world, and appear, afcer what they 
have already accomplished, to be only dawning on the world. 

In former ages mankind were as much divided and in doubt 
relative to the facts of material, as they still are concerning the 
laws of moral nature ; and followed up with as bitter persecution 
the pioneer of physical truth. Now, how changed ! no Galileo is 
cited to appear before the holy office ! No printer is held to 
answer for being in direct league with 'in alleged personal evil 
agency ! Conservatism is at length struck dumb in relation to the 
changes that uo doubt will be brought about in the future. 

Such having been the indisputable attendants of intelligibility 
regarding the first facts of the order natural to matter, why not 
introduce a like good understanding concerning the fundamental 
fact of the still more momentous concerns of mind — of human 
life, thought, language and action ? That such plain truths may 
be equally found in just conceptions of the mental as attended 
correct notions of physical order, cannot be successfully disputed. 
It is equally apparent that the state of tha world loudly calls for 
such a stable and intelligent basis for the science of mind when- 
ever an acquaintance with the subject will warrant a like cer- 
tainty and agreement so full of promise to man. 



48 

That this can be done is equally manifest, "because the order of 
moral nature remains as constant and unform, the chain of causes 
and effects as unbroken, and the laws of the emotions and their 
states are as operative, as well marked and as efficient as those 
of matter. 

That this will be done forms the only ground of hope for the 
world, the aspiration of every soul, and the sacred theme of the 
still hidden mystery of antiquity — the '' 2:ood time coming"— the 
time when mind shall rule. 

In society as it is or has existed, all admit something wrong 
somewhere. What that is has not been made sufficiently clear 
so as yet to effect its termination, or to arouse the latent energies 
of a dreaming world, to set them to work in the right quarter, 
and in a manner that might speedily prove successful. 

To bring about a change for the better by the application of 
some specific not understood, and hence inoperative, has been the 
long work of past centuries. Those claiming for their peculiar 
tenets the sole occupancy of the human mind have given dread 
specimens of their principles in their being divided, disputing, 
fighting and even roasting each other, and that, too, about their 
views of a remedy. None, however, have as yet discovered 
where the cause exists, far less found out the means of cure, or, 
w^hat is better, the means of prevention. 

It is therefore imperative to go back, back to first principles, 
or the world never can get righted; it being thus proved impos- 
sible to make the notions as at present held agree with the order 
natural to mind, produce the long-promised results, brin^ man- 
kind to agree about them, make any sense out of or make one 
view agree with the other. 

If in twenty centuries after being seated in power, having 
command of the temples and universities, the laws, literature and 
education, with the strength of empires at their back, continents 
pledged by oath to their support and the world very generally at 
their feet, and yet failed to become seated in the human under- 
standing, or even to be reduced by their advocates to practice. 
If they gradually grow more dim as physical truth becomes more 
bright ; if the nations in which they have existed the longest and 



49 

and where their devotees are the most devoted and numerous, 
present the greatest amount of moral ignorance, illiberality, beg- 
gary, vice, disease, insanity, war and crime ; then it were time 
to give up such a forlorn hope, such a desperate experiment, and 
try to find peace, consistency and well-being on some more prom- 
ising path. 

An error small in itself may derange weighty mental as well 
as physical operations : and many such have evidently attended 
the received theory of man. Its detection, however, and the dis- 
covery of the truth must be followed by the most happy effects. 
Even the reiteration of some neglected and despised fact, until 
mankind shall receive it, may be fraught with never-dying bene- 
fits to the world. 

A single change in the elements of thought will so alter the 
whole train or current of thinking in the minds of mankind as to 
correct their theory, set their practice to rights, and be seen and 
felt in their happy experience. What may be impossible under 
one view or theory of man may be perfectly easy under another. 

It is argued as an apology for the ignorance, hostile feeling, 
and misery of mankind, that those abstract principles cannot and 
ought not to be made intelligible to the common mind, that their 
"self-evidence" is not demonstrable to the human understand- 
ing, as even the most learned cannot agree about them in thou- 
sands of years, and concerning which the most talented contra- 
dict themselves in every statement they make, that the plain 
simplicity of truth would fail to command respect, that the 
masses are better pleased with the ridiculous and impossible, 
with acting over the rites and ceremonies of unopened mystery in 
some Gothic structure, with the original sense " hid from their 
eyes," like the shades of the departed going through the sacred 
orgies of the Grecian mysteries, and that they are more easily 
governed by what they do not understand than they would be by 
demonstrable science. 

Such is the admitted rottenness and false nature of the base 

on which the peace, the interests and prosperity of nations, and 

everything near and dear to man rest. The professor of moral 

science and the theologian still, however, hold on to a theory 

7 



60 

begun at the wrong end — a theory first merely supposed, and 
who, in the hope to find it one day true, have been looking 
through 19 centuries for the proof. But nature in man answers 
them not.- 

The politician and jurist can do no better than they have done, 
for the simple reason that the facts thus given are fallacies. 
Since the schools of philosophy were closed in Greece, and 
liberty banished, false elementary views have never as yet ceased 
to inflict evil in every form on the world. 

As, however, the day of the philosopher and liberty has come 
again in the new world, human ill may be extracted from life by 
withdrawing the cause in the learned data on which the theory is 
founded. Without, then, changing the form of society, the insti= 
tutions of governments, or interfering with the rights of property, 
a peaceful and happy change can be efiected by substituting first 
principles, which are true, and concerning which the truth could 
be made apparent. 

It is in this way that the present ignorance, dissension, dispu- 
tation, strife, hatred, revenge, and all the evils flowing from 
them could be at once terminated with their cause. 



CHAPTER V. 

THAT THERE IS A LAW OF MIND GOVERNING 

ALL VOLUNTARY MOTION WHICH MUST FORM 
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF A BETTER STATE 
OF CIVILIZED LIFE. 

Francis Bacon exposed the sound logic of tlie schools as based 
on false premises ; he scattered to the winds the web of sophistry 
with which Aristotle had interwoven man's views of external 
nature. But no Bacon has as yet broke the magic spell in which 
he had bound the thought, feeling, language and action of 
mankind. 

This party pleader in favor of aristocracy had broke with 
truth, with his democratic friends, Socrates and ^schylus, and 
with his master Plato, who all held the true view that there is a 
law of mind governing all the voluntary actions of man accord- 
ing as his mind's states come to be affected by intercourse, as 
certainly as there is a law guiding the planets in their path 
round the sun ; and that moral freedom from a cause is as im- 
possible as that any physical effect should fall out of itself. 

His patron, Philip of Macedon, subverted the liberties of 
Greece. His pupil Alexander conquered the known world* Bat 
after the lapse of over two thousand years the aristocrat-preceptor 
still subverts the rights and liberties of every nation, throws into 
the shade this divine law of the soul, reigns supreme over the 
minds, actions and destinies of man ; still governs Christendom ! ! 

Had Greece " known in her day the things that belonged to 
her peace," had she listened to her and the world's greatest 
sage, she would have still gone on in her career of unparalleled 
greatness. But no, she gave him a cup of cold poison; and her 
sons 1 

Rome, succeeding nations, and the endless variety of sects 
instead of taking their science of man from man himself, from the 
highest order of Grecian philosophy, or from the sacred mys- 



52 

teries of religion, preferred the views of the founder of the peri- 
patetic sect to every other, as being more favorable to conquest ; 
and his analysis of body into matter and form better suited to 
support the Catholic faith. It is not much more than 200 years 
since it was safe in Europe to dissent from the Aristotlean philoso- 
phy. Since then correct experiment and observation of facts have 
exposed his errors relative to natural science, so that they are now 
without an advocate; even the ecclesiastic has at length been 
compelled to abandon them. Not so, however, has it been with 
his notions of contingency relative to the voluntary action of man. 
In moral science and the world's mistaken views of religion the 
Stagirite is still triumphant ! 

The inhabitants of this earth have been at length allowed to 
perceive, contrary to his notions, that it moves as it is moved, 
through centripetal and centrifugal forces, round the sun ; even 
while retaining the error in language that the sun rises and sets. 
But the universities of Europe, America and the world have not 
been permitted as yet to see that the world within moves as it is 
moved by sympathies and antipathies, affinities, repulsions, and 
even contrarieties round the " better sun," that it moves through 
the action of forces as regular and certain as the material, and 
that its l^ht and warmth, its life and motion, are dependent on 
the action of those rays unobscured by clouds of error. 

What if, after all, it shall turn out, afier all that has been 
written, said, done and suffered, that the obliquity, want, strife, 
vice, war and blood are the concomitants inseparable from this 
learned blunder, the inevitable consequence of regarding the 
human will as not the necessary effect of the mind's states as 
they have been moulded and acted on by society itself, and that 
moral freedom from a cause is a libel on the mental, in like man- 
ner as his views have, one after the other, been found to be gross 
libels on the physical world ; an aristocratic lie, the base of the 
present form of social existence ! 

The period, therefore, has arrived in which the true motions of 
the world in which the soul dwells must be correctly ascertained, 
and the ideal of social existence must be remodelled on, or ac- 
cording to the true motions, as mankind cannot longer be held to 
their view of the hap-hazard movements of mind. 



63 

By this peripatetic sect, from which the " Christian fathers" 
took their moral philosophy as well as their natural, the seeds of 
human obliquity and evil are set down to the will as the exponen 
of the nature, instead of being charged to the socially imposed 
mental states, which heretofore have always conflicted with the 
nature. The will, say they, is the sole cause of wrong action ; 
as he who wills any act could have willed a different or a better 
act at the time, causes being the same ; therefore the will is all 
that has to be reached by remedial or coercive measures, and 
that, too, after, in general, the cause has forever passed beyond 
the reach of cure. 

In this way the thing to be proved is taken for granted, 
by begging the question ; hence the laws, government, education, 
intercourse and religion of past ages have been instituted on the 
dread faith, and mankind have proceeded to extreme measures on 
the fatal illusion that the will moves without a cause of motion, 
moves of itself, and that the character of action and belief resides 
in the will, simply because Aristotle said so. With the world, 
therefore, it is always the will, as the exponent of the nature, 
that is wrong ; never for once suspecting that the theory might 
be defective, the existing conditions that might be vicious, 
the entire system false, and consisting of Budhuism more than of 
genuine Christianity. 

The key which opened the secrets of external nature was the 
discovery of its true motions, and dispelled the errors of the 
Stagirite relative to natural science. In like manner, the key to 
open the occult secrets of the soul's world, to disclose the mys- 
tery of evil, revolutionize the Aristotlean empire of mind, and 
level up mankind to their true place, is the discovery of the true 
motions of the still unknown world within; the recognizing as a 
first fact the law, that in the generating of all human action, 
governs the will. 

The nature of a first fact is, that it cannot be doubted or dis- 
puted by any reasonable being that can understand its import, 
being self-evident and an exact representation of its subject as it 
is. Now, that the human will is not under the direction of the 
mind's states at the time, as they have been acted on through 



64 

social agency over which the will could have no power, is a pro- 
position which in all ages is not only not self-evident, not only 
doubted, but denied by all the great philosophers of ancient or 
modern times not in the receipt of remuneration, nor interested 
in the support of fallacy and class-privileges, or in league with 
despots. 

Among those who have entered their protest against it and 
ably disproved its truth may be mentioned Socrates, -^schylus, 
Plato, Hobbes, Collins, Hume, Leibnitz, Lord Karnes, Earl of 
Shaftesbury, Hartley, Edwards, Priestley, Locke, Cogan and 
.Bailey. On the side of the necessary action of the will are also 
to be found the ablest jurists, who have in this case rendered their 
■verdict and decided that in this disputation, which has extended 
through all ages, '' the advocates for a cause in the mind's states 
have it," that is, the argument ; but that in law "the advocates 
for freedom from a cause have it." Prof. Kant admits that "the 
liberty of the will cannot be defended by critical reason," but 
claims that " the deception is necessary for the government of 
man and the existing order of things." In this way he and the 
moral reasoner forgets that there is another side to this question, 
that what is impossible under one theory is perfectly feasible and 
easy under another, and that mankind may be better governed 
by truth than by an admitted fallacy. 

Has it come at last to this — after all the vile abuse, libels, 
curses, anathemas, punishment and suifering heaped on the head 
of defenceless humanity, that it is admitted that the very foun- 
dation is false, and even an apology offered for the horrors per- 
petrated through the system in the name of God ? After all the 
wars, burnings and hangings of the divine image, is it confessed 
that acts of the will take their nature, character and direction 
from conditions existing in and imposed on the mind's states by 
the system itself, and that man is compelled, through a moral 
process of ideal force, to be what he is ? 

The most unanswerable kind of proof of the existence of this 
law always governing the will as the mental states are acted on, 
in addition to that which its operation presents, is to take the 
testimony of two or three of the most learned and prominent 



55 

among the opposition ranks ; as their evidence cannot be well be 
set aside or got over. - 

Eirstlj, the " Encyclopedia Britannica," unfortunately for its 
high character, takes the popular but false side of this question, 
and, with the clergy and universities, giveS us its word that there 
is no law fixed by the hand of God to guide and direct the human 
will. Under the head of moral philosophy, it states that man 
possesses free will, and as a proof instances the case of Joseph 
and Potiphar's wife. Joseph himself, however, furnishes the 
answer in the negative in his memorable interrogatory, " IIoiv 
can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" Here, it 
admits that his desire to please God was the ruling cause. But 
the advocate for the necessary action of the will replies that this 
desire arises from his induced mind's- states and therefore governs 
the will. 

This failure on the part of such a standard work to prove what 
it attempts is of itself strong evidence of the truth of the contrary 
proposition. Its argument is very much like that of Pope in his 
prayer, where he says, 

"And binding nature fast in fate, ' 

Left free the human will." 

Here the poet has first all nature bound, then a part is left loose. 
Hence good poetry is sometimes bad philosophy as well as math- 
ematics, by having a part greater than a whole. 

Dr. Adam Clarke, another opposition witness and a learned 
divine of the Methodist persuasion, says, that " the determina- 
tions of the will and the last dictates of the understanding are 
the same." So far good. But he adds, ".free will is the mind's 
having power to have what dictates of the understanding it 
chooses." Thus making the will prior to the dictates of the un- 
derstanding and the cause of them; which does not agree with the 
dictates of the understanding being the determination of the 
choice, and at the same time the choice itself. In this way he 
makes the will an efiect its own cause. 

Dr. Reid, professor of moral philosophy, King's College, 
Ab erdeen, and latterly of the Glasgow University, a divine of 
the Church of Scotland, and the ablest opponent of the law of 



56 

mind governing all human action, states, Essay 4, chap 1, "If 
in every voluntary action the determinations of man's will be the 
necessary consequence of something involuntary in the state of 
his mind, or of something in his external circumstances, he is not 
free." This is a fair statement of the case, and must be fairly 
met. In answer, then, we first call on the learned doctor him- 
self to testify. 

He says. Essay 3, ch. 3, p. 113, "A person who has lived 
so long in the world as to observe that nature is governed by 
fixed laws, may have some rational grounds to expect similar 
events in similar circumstances." Page 110, " I apprehend that 
instinctive imitation has no small influence in forming the pecu- 
liarities of provincial dialects, the peculiarities of voice, gesture, 
and manners, which we see in some families, the manners pecu- 
liar to difierent ranks and different professions ; and perhaps, even, 
in forming national characters and the human character in gene- 
ral. There is a considerable part of the lowest rank in every 
nation, of whom it cannot be said that any pains have been taken 
by themselves or by others to cultivate their oiaderstandings or 
to form their manners ; yet we see an immense difference between 
them and the wild man. 

" This difference is wholly the effect of society." 

Page 112, " Man would never acquire the use of reason if he 
were not brought up in the society of reasonable creatures. The 
benefit he receives from society is derived partly from the imita" 
tion of what he sees others do, partly from the instruction and 
information they communicate to him." 

Chap. 8, page 194, " Man uncorrupted by bad habits and bad 
opinions, is of all animals the most tractable ; corrupted by these 
he is of all animals the most intractable. If civil government 
ghall be brought to perfection, it must be the principal care of 
the state to make good citizens by proper education and disci- 
pline." 

" The most useful part of medicine is that which strengthens 
the constitution and prevents diseases by good regimen ; the rest 
is somewhat like propping a ruinous fabric at great expense and 
to little purpose. The art of government is the medicine of the 



57 

mind, and tlie most useful part is that which prevents crimes and 
bad habits, and trains men to virtue and good habits, by proper 
education and discipline. 

" The present age has made great advances in the art of training 
men to military duty ; and I know not why it should be thought 
impossible to train men to equal perfection in the other duties of 
good citizens. What should hinder us from thinking, that, for 
every purpose of civil government, there may be a like difference 
between a civil society properly trained to virtue, good habits, 
and right sentiments, and those civil societies which we now 
behold ?" 

Essay 4, chap 4, " The more children see of what is regular 
and beautiful in what is presented to them, the more they are led 
to observe and imitate it. This is the chief part of their stock, 
and descends to them by a kind of tradition from those who came 
before them ; and we shall find that the fancy of most men is 
furnished from those they have conversed with, as well as their 
religion, language, and manners. 

" Every profession and every rank in life has a manner of 
thinking and turn of fancy that is peculiar to it, by which it is 
characterized in comedy and works of humor. The bulk of men 
of the same station, of the some rank, and of the same occupa- 
tion, are cast, as it were, in the same mould. This mould changes 
gradually but slowly, by new inventions, by intercourse with 
strangers, or by other accidents." 

Thus the professor goes behind the voluntary determinations of 
man, and lifts up the dark curtain that hitherto has hid the inse- 
parable connection between the act of willing and the socially 
imposed mind's states. He most ably and conclusively proves 
that in coming to any and every determination of will man 13 
acting under the influence of a moral, not a mechanical or phy- 
sical cause previously existing ; that from the position in which 
he first drew the breath of life and the elements with which 
his susceptibilities are brought into close proximity, over which 
he cannot be supposed to exert any control, " the determinations 
of his will are the necessary consequence of something involun- 
tary in the state of his mind, or of something in his external 
8 



circumstances."^ Tiiia muchj then, from tlie opposition settles 
tlie point. 

ISsTobetter proof could be offered to show that the evil is not in 
the marijbut in the state into which he is brought, or that wrong 
actmn arises from any arbitrary or uncaused determination of his 
will ; or that those determinations could have, by any possibility, 
been otherwise, preceded, as they were, by the same mental states, 
or without some change in the external circumstances, than is 
here done by this, Scotch divine. 

■^He clearly asserts the existence of this law which rules the 
motions of mind, that by recognizing and acting on it mankind 
could be far better and happier governed through moral influ- 
ence' than they can be through physical agency— that moral- 
effects follow moral causes with the same degree of certainty as ; 
physical, . and that, other things being equal, like results will 
always attend on similar causes. Hence, that acts of the human- 
will are necessary in_ given circumstances, and therefore may be 
of the required character, provided that the befitting elements are- 
supplied ; that it is the theory, not the soul of man that is wrong ; 
the learned that are mistaken in the science of human nature, as 
they have been in every other, and not "the noblest work of 
God" that js at. fault. The existence of this law, known to the 
greatest of ancient as well as modern sages, is taught in the^ 
sacred mysteries, is darkly visible, although not admitted, and> 
even acted on to a great extent in all human affairs; yet it i3"_ 
not recognized or reduced to practice in the most important con- 
cerns of life, r J£ri§>i^ therefore, only necessary to banish this error 
with the mode of action erected on it, and to carry out in its place 
in social intercoui'se, education and religion, the true vieTy^in., 
order to introduce mankind to a. happy state of existence^ ,,: j,.f{j 
'Socrates, the father of this "better way," says, that "no one-, 
acted contrary to what he apprehended it were best to do, except^ 
from ignorance of what were best, " Plato states, Eepublic, book 
7, "That all errors are involuntary, because there is need of a 
false preposition to the existence of error. Since, therefore, the • 
major proposition is false, a person is said to have erred involun., . 
tarily because we fall into falsehopd involuntarily; for no qjx^.. 



r,,,{^-: -;- - - r; ; ■■ '-,-£::: ,?,_:,/: .ajnev J .jj- bcislann s.:. ,-ro::ov: .':rJ:?::;■ 
'Wl^lngly admits what, js,.,%]^f, :^i»c%^aj|.:5ae»()i^jb^^ 
truth." . . . ,,;• ^^^^ '• r ..^•^,^,..^ f.-.,, ^^^nh -^-ja-^or'' j'::^ 

^schylus also eloquently expresses the sarae fact. He says, 
that "No one is willingly depraved, or unwillingly blessed.' '; 
To the first part, however, Aristotle objects, and in his EthiG.s,t; 
book 3, chap. 5, asserts that "if it is allowed that no one is wilr,. 
lingly depraved, it would make man the, generator of hia actions^ 
as he is of his kind." 

* Like all objectors to this great first principle, instead of argUrr'^ 
ment he brings against it only consequences which he apprehends 
would follow, and which might lead to wrong views. Now 
to this assertion it is replied, that it is self-evident that no 
one ever chooses evil as evil, but under the mistaken idea that 
it is a good ; and as it is proved that there are no innate ideas in 
the mind, therefore a depraved mental state is involuntary, the 
same as a diseased state of body. Hence evil action is generated 
by extrinsic agency acting on the mind's emotions, which the indi- 
vidual has not the moral power to render otherwise, conditions; 
being the same. This assertion he himself also refutes where he 
gays very properly, "guard well the eye andear of the child, and 
keep him from the company of servants." Again, Ethics, book 
2, chap. 1, " For the legislators hj accustoming the citizens to 
virtue render them worthy characters; and such is the intention, 
of every legislator, but such as do not effect this well, err. And 
in this one policy differs from another, the good from the bad." 
And again, "It is of no small consequence, therefore, to be thus 
or thus accustomed immediately from our youth, but it is of very 
great consequence, or rather it is everything." Hence he ad- 
mits that depravity is* an induced and involuntary state of mind, 
formed prior to the will. 

Contrary to all this, however, he, in support of the great error ;| 
of the will, asserts that " contingent events are not necessary, 
therefore the human will is free," But in this inference the , 
premises are erroneous, and therefore the base of the present 
theory of human life is false; by which error, however, the, 
world for over two thousand years has presented one unbroken / 
scene of evil and suffering. 



60 

Contingency, as applied to events, must imply that the same 
causes produce one kind of events at one time and another kind 
at another time, and hence would not be necessary. . But accord- 
ing to an ultimate law of our nature, and a self-evident proposi- 
tion in science, it ia admitted that the same causes always produce 
the same kind of events, or when there is an alteration in the 
one there is a corresponding alteration in the other. Therefore 
the contrary must be absurd, and the term contingency can not 
be applied to events. Hence moral events, like physical, must 
be necessary as the constant conjunction of the same event 
attending on the same causes, and the assumption of mind attend- 
ing on this observance, form all idea we have of necessary 
connection. 

Contingency or uncertainty is only applicable to a state of mind 
defective in regard to a knowledge of the causes operating in the 
production of some event in the future ; which feeling of uncer- 
tainty, so general relative to the causes of voluntary actions, has 
led to the supposition of a greater degree of contingency as 
belonging to them than to physical occurrences. In the early 
Btages of knowledge the same degree of fortuity was held as 
belonging to the operations of external nature ; but as a better 
acquaintance with the rules of action in the production of phy- 
eical events came to be attained, all notions of things falling out 
of themselves or hj chance were given up. In like manner, as 
we arrive at just views of mind, contingency in the formation of 
voluntary action must be forever abandoned, and mankind be led 
to banish the elements of evil and to invoke the causes necessary 
to the production of salutary mental phenomena. 

'That all man's voluntary actions proceed from their causes, 
with the same unvarying sequence as physical events arise from 
their causes, by this law or condition of thought, is a truth estab- 
lished on the best authority, and is thus further proved. 

Solomon says, " Train up a child in the way he should go, and 
when he is old he will not depart from it.'' 

According to the sacred text, the same law^s recognized in the 
gospel theory of man — "Father, forgive them; for they 
know not what they do.'' <'jFor it is God that worketh in 



61 

in you botli to will and to do." " Lord, lay not this sin to their 
charge'' 

A modern poet expresses the same in words which have become 
proverbial. 

" 'Tis education forms the common mind ; 
Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined." 

This law still becoming more apparent, and being about to 
dawn with full effulgence on the world, a sage "writer also 
remarks, "What you wish the child to be, be that to the child." 

As further proof, if any more were wanting, it may be instanced 
that if the order of moral nature, like physical, remains always 
the same, and if man has already progressed through five stages 
of civilization and is making rapid strides towards the sixth, it 
must consequently be the mental states that have changed, ac- 
cording as his views of the order natural to matter and mind have 
varied. 

We can also trace the consequences of the various shades of 
opinion, the moral force of the press, of schools and the diffusion 
of literature, the direction given and the nature of the institutions 
in moulding the thought, feeling, language, genius, manners, 
habits and actions of a people in the different nations on the 
globe. We can recognize a marked distinction in the various 
grades and classes of the same country, and perceive surprising 
changes in the different periods of history. 

We must, therefore, admit the potent agency of the laws, edu- 
cation, government, religion and state of public opinion, property 
agriculture, manufactures and commerce in shaping the general 
and individual mental states, and consequently ruling the volun- 
tary actions and state of mankind. Differences there are, and 
must ever exist, arising from constitution, age, sex and state ; 
but with the fundamental error of supposing that man's voluntary 
action and mental states are self-formed, abstracted from the 
theory of human nature and social life, those differences must be 
found, like all other arrangements in the moral or physical econ- 
omy, to be wise, beneficial, and even necessary. 

Thus, then, the philosophy of a remote age, the ecclesiastic, the 
education, intercourse, jurisprudence and governments of force 



62 

have done their best, done all they could, have had a fair trial. 
By working on the organic error that no law of mind, arising from 
its super-induced states, regulated the will, on a theory conflicting 
with itself, with man's nature, with the moral government of the 
world and the Divine attributes, mankind are not nearer the hap- 
piness indicated by their moral being ; but are as far, if not 
further, from the due exercise of all their powers, or from their 
being brought to a just balance, as in ancient Greece and Rome. 
The correct view of the motions of the human will forms, 
therefore, the turning-point between the true and the false philo- 
sophy, between a mystic and an intelligible religion, and between 
the happiness and misery of mankind. 



j&uca off 



VJ ,^ii 



,'i.U 



63 

•^0 knpS'Xoq -s c 



CHAPTER VI, 
THE GREAT DISCOVERY OF THE TRUE MESSIAH. 

No subject has been beset with such difficulties, burdened with 
an equal amount of obscurity and contradiction, or produced such 
an intensity of bitter feeling as that of man's deliverance from 
evil. In an endeavor to cure moral and physical ill it is there- 
fore indispensable to set the human mind right on a question at 
once so simple and sublime in itself, involving, as its does, its 
highest hopes and most sacred interests, and concerning which 
not one of the sects or schools have succeeding in solving. -^^ 
Although every age and people, the sword, the pen and thie 
flames of the stake have been engaged on it, yet after all the 
writings, teachings, dispute and intolerance, fanaticism and in- 
sanity, it is still the same ancient mystery. From the want of 
some solid base, of rising from facts to the theory, every argu- 
ment has failed to enlighten or convince, and every proof has 
fallen still-born on the world. The very plainness of the truth 
seems to have been the chief cause of its having eluded the acu- 
men of the paid retainer, the devotee, as well as the "infidel" 
opponent. The absence of "purse or scrip," golden crosiers and 
crucifixes, mitres and palliums, cro\vns, tiaras and trumpery in 
" the kingdom not of this world," and under a reign "which 
cometh not with observation," was sufficient ground of objection 
to those " who had not ears to hear." The professed divine teacher 
has kept on explaining, contradicting himself, and splitting up 
mankind into an endless variety of hostile sects, and still no 
light, qooom . ■^' 

At length the human mind, unable, with such guides, to catch' 
the idea of its own salvation, is driven to abandon so hopeless a 
task, and either settles down in black hypocrisy or cheerless un- 
belief, saying, "we trusted that it had been he which should have 
redeemed Israel." 
The Jew's expected a temporal prince. The Christians are 



64 

divided into seven hundred distinct sects relative to a personal or 
corporeal Deliverer ; while the unbelievers are the growth of the 
defects in both, but chiefly from literal interpretations of the 
sacred symbols, and from their first having formed a theory of 
man and gone a begging for facts, without finding one in so many 
centuries. 

But the true doctrine of the human will lights up our darkness 
concerning the world in which the soul dwells, shows the daylight 
side of human nature, settles the disputes concerning the native 
innocence and goodness of the soul and the natural health and 
soundness of man's physical frame. This view, termed the 
Socratic, of the necessary action of the will as the mind's 
states come to be wrought on, exhibits the true and only possible 
mode of man's deliverance from the ills imposed on him through 
the world's false system, by correcting the occasions to physical 
as well as moral evil, simply by adjusting man's state to the fixed 
and unalterable laws of his being. 

Divine Intelligence pervades the universe, " is visible in the 
beings that are made," so that "a sparrow falleth not to the ground 
without" the divine care; yet by the supposition that there is no 
law directing the motions of the world within, man's vision has 
been sealed to the true moral economy. He has lived, therefore, 
in a world of his own making — a world without a sun— entirely 
unlike, and the very counterpart of God's world ; he has exiled 
the Divinity from the earth, filled it with fearful agencies, and 
thereby cursed and embittered every hour of his earthly career. 

The human understanding has thus failed among every people, 
as it ever must fail, to form any harmonious view of this free- 
will theory, of the existence of physical and moral evil, and 
scheme for the amelioration in the condition, the improve- 
ment, or redemption of man. Notwithstanding a monopoly of 
the learning and talent, the land and wealth, the power, patron- 
age and education of the people, with military, police, law courts, 
jails, gibbets, and a place of doom, and with angels, demons, 
spirits, heretics, criminals and fanatics at their back, still error 
and evil triumph. 

Man is told to believe, and in the same breath he is told that 



• 65 

he cannot believe unless he will, that he cannot will unless he 
pray, that he cannot pray unless he believe, and that he cannot 
believe unless it is given him. Such is the logic or magic circle 
of schools of divinity, first to make all dark, then to raise evil 
spirits. 

R-emorse, tears, repentance, prayers, creeds, punishment in 
an'i out of life ; washing in the Ganges, Nile, Ilissus or Jordan ; 
sprinkling children or adults, making forms of the cross, expia- 
tion by sacrifices of bulls, goats, white dogs, lambs, " the fruit of 
the body for the sin of the soul" of man, and even incarnate 
Divinity ; eating the body and drinking the blood, or doing so in 
remembrance of the paschal lamb, the torn limbs of Zagreus, 
lacchus, or the Messiah; making vows, doing penance, confes- 
sion of crimes, receiving absolution, obtaining indulgence and in- 
flicting punishment, have been resorted to in order to avert 
impending evil, to appease the wrath of the Divine Parent, who 
cannot be enraged, to save man when he is not lost, and to alter 
his nature which cannot be changed. 

As well might the teachers of the world think of alterijg the 
nature of plants or animals, reversing the tides of the ocean, or 
changing the motions of the planets. 

With the aristocratic form of social life, with the view that 
man can believe, will and act contrary to or independent of a 
cause in his mind's states and external conditions, but with a 
democratic creed, a nominal profession of humility, poverty, self- 
denial, purity, sincerity, care for the poor, a hatred of war, bhiod 
and implements of death, contempt for riches, and the frowns or 
favors of this world so characteristic of the first Christians, man 
now plays more successfully and skillfully the tyrant, the hypo- 
crite, the proud oppressor of the poor, wastes their substunec, 
becomes the warrior, the duellist, the legal robber or njurdercry 
and revels in debauchery worse than the worshippers of Z* us, 
Jupiter, Adonis or Eloi in the nations of ancient Greece, Home. 
or Judea. 

The world, therefore, is not redeemed, no correct or consistent 
reading given by any of the sects of the mythic or symbolic of 
sacred mystery ; even new diseases are being generated ; desti- 
9 ' 



66 

tution, dissent, strife, war, vice and crime are on tlie increase, 
men are further than ever from being brethren, and the serpent 
of false learning is still victorious over man. Hence the world's 
notions of a corporeal Redeemer, as of a temporal Messiah, have 
been signally inefficient and a gross failure, unworthy of an Om- 
nipotent and Allwise Father, and therefore a literal reading is 
untenable. But the Omniscient, the sun of the soul, like the 
physical Bun, his image, gives the clearest evidence that he super- 
intends all human affairs, overrules everything for good through 
the fixed laws. Hence the sufferings of humanity, come and gone 
at present taking place, or shall occur, are vicarious and endured 
to save those coming after from their errors, diseases and sins. 
The human species, in this way, are considered a unity, and the 
knowledge thus attained is said to be the Divinity coming in man. 

That this is the true version of the sacred myth or secret doc- 
trine can be proved to the greatest certainty, and by the most 
irrefragible evidence. All must admit the prevalence of symbols 
and types in the literature of the ancients, and that they must be 
read philosophically in order to make sense, or to arrive at the 
hidden signification. Hence the seed of the woman which 
was to bruise the head of the serpent, of Moses ; the ** Logos" 
of Plato; the " word made flesh ;" 'Hhe Lamb slain from the 
foundations of the world," of St. John ; and '* a light to them that 
sit in darkness and in the shadow of death," of St. Luke, refer to 
the development of moral truth in the ideal, through which man- 
kind are to be saved. 

That it is humanity that is the sacrifice, " the Lamb of God 
which taketh away the sins of the world ;" that it is the race 
going before that has suffered, been degraded, rendered poor, 
vicious, diseased and criminal, is fully established by the very 
words of the symbol or impersonation of Intelligence thus coming 
in the soul. Thus the Messiah is represented as saying, ** For I 
was a hungered, and ye gave me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye 
gaue me no drink ; / was a stranger, and ye took me not in j 
naked, and ye clothed me not ; sick, and in prison, and ye visited 
me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, when saw we 
thee a hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, 
or in prison, and did not minister unto thee ? 



67 

" Then shall he answer them, saying, verily I say tinto yon> 
inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye 
did it not unto we." — Mat. xxv, 42 to 45. 

No language can be more sublime or expressive of the great 
design, the averting power or expiatory nature of the suffering^ 
distress and wrong heaped on the race by the world's false sys- 
tem, than the words of Isaiah. He says, " He hath borne oar 
griefs and carried our sorrows ; he was despised and rejected of 
men ; the chastisement of our peace was upon him ; and with his 
stripes we are healed. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, 
yet he opened not his mouth ; he is brought as a lamb to the 
slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb so he 
openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from 
judgment ; for the transgressions of my people was he stricken." 
— Is. liii. 

In this way we are enabled to read those mytJii to some pur» 
pose ; to see that the nature of man is innocent and good, docile 
and tractable ; that all voluntary actions receive their direction 
from the mind's states, and that those states derive their quality 
from the world's theory acting on them. If, then, human actions 
are wrong, the mind's states are wrong, and hence the world's 
theory must be in error. It is, then, for the correction of man's 
visionthat humanity suffers, that those coming after may behold 
the truths of God and live, " For the transgression of my people 
was he stricken." 

The wail of grief, the cry of agony, the shrieks of despair and 
streams of blood have passed, or are passing. They seem to be 
lost as they are soon forget, and to be of no earthly value or use ; 
even others in myriads appear hurrying on to add to their dread 
amount. But not so in the order of final causes— not so in the 
world of the soul. " With his stripes we are healed," 

There not a needless tear has been shed, not a sigh escaped 
from a heavy heart, nor a groan uttered, even though unheard 
by mortal ear, has been thrown away. Not a drop of life's 
current has flowed fresh from the arterial canal, unseen ; not a 
duel has been fought, a maniac raved, or a suicide perpetrated ; 
not a pang has been felt, a sickness endured, or an untimely death 



68 

siiflTered in vain. The battle cry has been hushed in the silence 
of the grave j the vulture and wolf have feasted on the slain ; 
the cell door has closed on one who would have been different, if 
he could ; the stake fire has blazed, the rack has been set in 
motion, the limbs have cracked on the wheel of torture, the 
Bastile has been reared, the image of the Divinity taken down 
from the gibbet or left dangling in chains on this tree of know- 
ledge. " The chastisement of our peace was upon him." The 
plague, cholera, fever, fire, famine, drunkenness, insanity and 
crime have raged. Humanity has been the sacrifice. Man " was 
L;J as a lamb to the slaughter." 

Although to the world these sufferings are without number, 
and although evils engross human thought without man being 
able to see sny means of escape, yet they have all been seen, 
numbered, weighed, and will be answered by the hitherto *' un- 
known God in the salvation of the rav.e from a lost, a fallen 
system. " lie made intercession for the transgressors." 

The knowledge of the necessaries of life, the advanced state of 
the arts and sciences, establishment of governments, settling 
new countries, correcting vulgar notions of religion, reforming old 
abu:?es, modes of social life, and how mankind shall look on the 
actions of each other have been attended with great misery and 
cost the race dear. The doctrine that man could will different 
from the socially induced states of his mind and external agencies, 
has kept tne world in a state of continual strife and suffering. 
" He shall see of the travail of his soul." 

But, according to the moral economy, the high and blissful 
position to which these sacrifices must raise the race will amply 
repay th.^ sufferings endured. It was in this way that the world 
in which the soul dwells had to be lighted up, through which the 
wounds and diseases of body and mind and society had to be 
healed, and a happy future gained for all future ages. " There- 
fore will J divide him a portion with the great." 

When the aristocratic form of social life and religion have 
monpolized God's earth, hunted his offspring off the soil of their 
birth, denied them a home or the right of way on its surface, and 
even a grave in its bosom ; when capital has brought labor down 



m 

to the starving point as it comes to find a more profitable invest- 
ment, or is withdrawn entirely from its legitimate or pretended 
operation. The markets are glutted, too many houses, too much 
clothing, a ruinous plenty this year, and no work ; plenty of 
starvation, great distress, dying in the streets without a home, 
clothing, or anything in the stomach, granaries and their owners 
breab'ng down, bakeries broke into, rioters shot down : coroners' 
inquests; verdict, " died by the visitation of God." "We did 
esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted." In this way, 
the divinity coming in humanity has been " blotting out the 
handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was con- 
trary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross ; 
and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a ?how of 
them openly, triumphing over them in it." — Col. 2, 14, 15. 

Because the world's retained teachers saw, or thought they 
saw, unbelief, want, obliquity and disease in human nature or in 
the divine order, while these were but the reflection in man of the 
evils, wrongs, wickedness, villainy and barbarity in their own 
system, they immured him in workhouses, penitentiaries and 
dungeons, condemned, hanged, quartered, or burned him in order 
to effect a cure of social evils ; yet after ages of trial the only 
result has been that their own theory is proved to be false, that 
the Divinity has not erred, that man, his noblest work, is not the 
failure that they have made him, but that his state and the 
world's system must be adjusted to his nature. "Because he had 
done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth." 

As further evidence of having " found him of whom Moses 
and the prophets wrote," it is necessar;y to refer to the mythic or 
symbolic writings of the nations and epochs through which they 
have come down to- the present day. By thus understanding 
their mode of writing, and by the evidence which the subject 
itself presents, we shall arrive at sound views of the incarnation 
of the Divinity tbus coming in man, the correct reading of which, 
the aristocratic form of religion or the world's theology has 
missed, as the facts so abundantly prove. 

The Lncients invariably taught or wrote on the papyrus, the 
rock, or on the heavens in allegory or parables. Their learning 



70 

and teachings are therefore couched in very strong but expressive 
and highly wrought metaphor, with figures within figures, requir- 
ing the key to unlock their hidden treasures of knowledge. The 
arts and sciences have made their escape from their first form or 
infant dress. Not so, however, with the holiest and most impor- 
tant branch of knowledge, the science of the soul. Man's ideas 
of the motions and order of the world of mind are still in their 
swaddling clothes. 

The literal reading, the vulgar sense or narrative form was 
taught then, as now, to the masses. The true or secret meaning 
was only made known to the initiated. " Art thou a master in 
Israel and knowest not these things ?" 

It is this historical rendering of these sublime but allusive 
pictures that has raised all the difficulty ; divides mankind into 
sects, makes belief and action, contrary to the sacred text as well 
as true philosophy, to be in the power of the will, leads the world 
to seek by physical means to produce moral effects — to suppose 
that man can be abused, frightened and punished into creeds and 
goodness, conserves its aristocratic form, and by which it gene- 
rates human frailties, disease and every evil. 

In this sense religion is made secretly a pious fraud ; hence its 
want of success in so many ages, notwithstanding such an enor- 
mous expenditure with standing armies for missionaries ; whereas 
the simple truth would be very soon triumphant " without purse 
or scrip," because it would support itself like the rays of the sun. 
3ut, whether or not, its divine power must soon dawn, as the 
human mind cannot be much longer mesmerized into the free-will 
psychological state, even when operated on from infancy and one 
day in every seven. 

Already those whose knowledge or independent spirit admit of 
their having and expressing an opinion on the subject, and who 
read the attributes of the Divinity inscribed in living letters on 
man's soul and throughout the universe, are compelled, even 
against their will and their interest, however much teachers may 
rave, to repudiate such a version of " types and shadows." 

Even those calling themselves Christian on the present received 
theory, among whom by far the greater part are nominal and 



another great part hypocritical, cannot bring themselves to think 
that infants, or a child born and reared in St. Giles, London, the 
lowest condition, or a child in St. James', the highest, as neither? 
humanly speaking, can be good without other agencies, would be 
consigned to an eternity of punishment for being what he could 
not avoid, more especially as such discipline is not even intended 
to be remedial. 

Moreover, according to the literal reading, the Divine Power 
coming in the world is confined, as claimed, to a few years, when 
all the gifts, miracles and blessings cease, and mankind left worse 
than before those things are said to have occurred ; whereas, ac- 
cording to the true interpretation, the same powers were to 
remain with his people, even greater works shall he do who " has 
faith as a grain of mustard seed ;" also the Spirit was to come 
who was "to teach all things." *• Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
he that believeth on me, the works that I do he shall do also ; 
and greater works than these shall he do." — John 14, 12, Mark 
16, 17, 18; Luke 10, 17; Acts 2, 4 and 5, 16 and 8, 7 and 16^ 
18 and 19, 6 ; 1st Cor. 12, 10, 28. Notwithstanding the false 
pretences of the Romish Church to the contrary, not a trace, 
evidence, gift, grace or spirit has been left, in the Church or in 
the world. Not a promise fulfilled, a prophecy accomplished, or 
any mark or sign of divine agency has been visible among the 
professed followers of the Messiah already come* Hence a 
literal version of sacred narrative proves itself untenable. 

Besides, by the view of the necessary action of. the human 
will as arising from the given states of man's mind, as well as 
from his given nature, it is ascertained to demonstration that the 
justice of God had not to be vindicated, especially by injustice 
and blood, according to the aristocratic theology. But according 
to the true interpretation of the sacred text and true moral 
science, man had to learn to fall in with the divine laws in order 
to escape physical and moral ill, which has never yet ceased to 
follow the world's false theory. Thus the opening of man's 
vision to the true order is the Divinity coming in humanity, by 
which such wonders are to be wrought, miracles performed, gifts 
obtained, and blessings purchased. 



72 

According, then, to the emblematic language of the epoch, who 
or wLat taketh away the sins of the world, will " heal all manner 
of diseases by laying hands on the sick, cast out devils, take up 
serpents, or drink deadly things without being hurt, give sight 
to the blind, hearing to the deaf, make the lame to walk and open 
the prison doors to them that are bound ?" Answer — The Divine 
Intelligence, the "Logos," the "word" coming in the human 
soul giving a knowledge of the laws of the electric fluid of the 
system, and psychology or true doctrine of mind. Man lives, 
moves and has his being in the Divinity, but the world's specula- 
tive theory closes his mental vision to the divine order. II e 
thinks, lives, speaks and acts, therefore, in opposition to Omni- 
potence, and is wretched. All, then, that man needs is his mind's 
states to be set right relative to that order, to be blessed. The 
best proof of the truth of Lis views, or the correctness of his 
mind's states, is his condition. 

All that we know, believe, and act on are but impressions made 
on the soul. False impressions contain all the frailties, penury, 
vice, sickness, pain and wickedness in man. They exist in the 
world's teachings, are merely conventional, and as such are re- 
movable. Truth, or every true impressiouj is the Divinity, the 
sun of the mind, and contains the cure and prevention of all the 
individual and social evils of the world. Hence, the devil is a 
false impress communicated to the soul by the world's teachers, 
and is expressed in the feelings, looks, language and actions of 
humanity. And the Divinity coming in man, in the "flesh," his 
true impress made on the soul, and is expressed in the feelings, 
looks, language and actions of humanity. 

It is therefore not the communication with departed spirits that 
is to redeem the world; such notions being fraught with the 
dreadful evils of hypochondria, insanity and false impressions of 
the divine order, " making the last state of that man or that 
woman worse than the first;" which fact is but too evident. 
" They have Moses and the prophets, if they will not hear them, 
neither would they believe if one rose from the dead." " Thou 
art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel 
acknowledge ua not." 



73 

But by having the mind's vision opened t® the divine order, 
thereby obtaining direct communication with the giver of all 
good through the eternal laws, man attains " the inspiration of the 
Almighty, which giveth him understanding." Truth, therefore, 
coming in the virgin niind through suffering is the Messiah, 
which, when " lifted up (placed in the ascendant), will draw all 
men unto him' ' (it). By showing that the evil is in the world's 
theory, and thereby overcoming it, the truth taketh away the 
sins of the world and healeth all manner of diseases. Hence the 
gifts, the miracles, the graces and blessings of truth and the spirit 
are not withdrawn or taken out of the world, but the false reli- 
gions of the world have shut out the light, and with it all good- 
ness, health and happiness from man. 

That this is the correct reading of the sublime emblems of a 
forgotten epoch will more fully appear as we proceed in the inter- 
pretation of the hieroglyphics of remote antiquity, and by the 
effects which must follow on the rise of "the light." 

In ancient Egypt and Chaldea, through which the mysteries have 
come down to our time, we find the divine name of lESUS to 
signify the light or sun of the world of mind, like as the physical 
sun is the light of day and the source of life, warmth and motion.' 
In their temples, also, we find everywhere the famous symbol of 
the sphinx cut in stone, having the head of a virgin on the body 
of a lion. According to hieroglyphic language every object had 
an individual signification, combined with some other, the sense 
consisted of the two conjoined. Thus, then, from the virgin im- 
plying mind, because conceiving ideas, as a woman has children, 
and the lion signifying strength, we have, in symbol form, the 
mind giving birth to ideas, is strong and will overcome all things. 
A lamb is innocence, a tree or cross is knowledge, a lamb bearing 
a cross is knowledge coming in the world through the innocent 
suffering, ^sculapius with his tree and serpent is medicine. 

Throughout their temples, also, we find engraved in stone the 
constellation of the heavens of Adam and Eve ; the tree, serpent 
and garden answering to the description of Moses. By marking 
off the fixed stars into groups, they, in this manner, made a book 
of the stars, and inscribed their views of the divine order on the 
10 



74 

heavens. Hence came the false science of judicial astrology and 
false religions ; and hence come the expressions, look to heaven, 
pray to heaven, consult heaven ; while " the kingdom of God is 
mthin you.'* 

Here Eve is the virgin or mind, Adam the physical frame? 
mind being considered as separate from body, but having a rela- 
tionship like husband and wife ; the tree is knowledge, the ser- 
pent the world's learning, the garden happiness ; cherubim, the 
heads of oxen on the lower half of men,'this implied the living on 
animal food and its consequences, the flaming sword the passions, 
the wings the shortness of life arising from the unnatural mode 
of living, their guarding the tree of life in keeping man to an 
animal existence, sickness, war and crime. 

Taken in the literal sense,, as Dr. Adam Clarke does, a speak- 
ing serpent justly shocks his understanding, and he endeavors to 
get over the difficulty by m.aking it worse. He thinks that it 
must have been an ourang outang. Other commentators and the 
whole brood of divinity schools take in serpent and all, thereby 
making sad work to the present day of God's universe and the 
soul of man from taking a symbolic figure as literally true. 

Divested, however, of the hieroglyphic form, nothing in modern 
thought or expression can come anything near to its sublimity, 
truth and beauty. Being interpreted it reads thus. The mind, 
in order to find ideas of things and modes of their operation, is . 
curious and desires to partake of knowledge. But being without 
first facts to guide it in the formation of a sound view, takes up a 
rash conjecture ; and learning in this way at first draws it into 
error. The physical frame shares in the efiects of this false step 
from being led to live in opposition to the order of nature in food 
and drink, in the use of the flesh of animals and salt, together 
with too much or too little exercise, and want of fresh air and 
bathing. Hence comes the obliquity of mind and diseases of the 
body in men and women, which they must continue to sufi*er from 
until the ofispring of the virgin mind shall enable them to see 
that the causes to evil exist in their induced states of mind, in- 
stead of their nature, and abandon them. 

This false learning of taking ideas for granted from phenomena 



75 

as they at first seem, and without proof, lies at the bottom of all 
human misery ; it descends to low cunning, grovels in and is 
made to bite the dust. Enmity arises between speculative views, 
or what passes for learning, and the light of truth arising from 
experience, observation of facts and sound reflection. 

But " the seed of the woman (so different is the use of the 
term here used from all other passages in which it occurs, as it is 
always the seed of Abraham, of Isaac, Jacob, David, &c., that 
something very different must be implied) shall bruise thy head ;" 
that is, the light of the world of the soul, Jesus the moral sun, 
Divine Intelligence generated in the virgin mind will extinguish 
the false learning of the world of the soul and the evil it has 
brought on man ; " and thou shalt bruise his heel;" that is, the 
world, through its error, will follow after this offspring of the 
virgin mind with persecution, until at length Intelligence will 
stamp on and crush false learning out of existence. 

Here we have very clearly expressed the manner in which man 
goes astray from the natural order, falls a prey to evil, and that 
humanity suffering under error is the sacrifice by which the race 
is to be restored. " The Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world." 

With this key to the secret doctrines, we now proceed briefly 
to open up the great " mystery hid from the foundations of the 
world" to the present day. 

Dupuis, a profound French writer, maintains that Christ and 
his Apostles had no personal existence, but were symbols of the 
sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac. But instead of this, the 
physical sun and signs are symbols of the "better sun " and his 
constellations of true first principles. They have a personal ex- 
istence, but in the spiritual or true ideal, perceptible only to the 
soul's vision ; and as that vision comes to be opened their 
presence is visible in the phenomena produced, in the same way 
as our knowledge of the presence of external nature is attained. 

In proof of this view the works of this sublime mystery are 
sufiiciently explicit, viz. : " I am understanding. The soul pos- 
sessed me in the beginning, before his works of old. Before the 
mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth. 



76 

When lie laid tlie foundations of the earth I was there, rejoicing 
in the habitable parts of his earth ; and my delights were with 
the children of men." "Before Abraham was I am." "When 
two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the 
midst." 

Relative to the sun and signs being symbols of the great Deli- 
verer, the Magi of Egypt and- Chaldea, in order to hand down 
their teachings to every age and people, made a book of the 
heavens and inscribed their moral science on its pages. In this 
way they made the sun and his seeming path in the heavens sym- 
bolic of the rise of truth, the sun of the soul, " the light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 

As evidence of this fact we find all ages and people keeping 
their feasts, fasts and holy days, agreeing exactly with the 
motions of the sun and moon. At the winter solstice — the birth 
of Christ — he is baptized as he enters Aquarius, the water bearer, 
moving up " straightway out of the waters," the flight of the dove 
announces his coming. Between Aquarius and Pisces lies the 
wilderness where the star Jupiter, anciently Lucifer, appears to 
approach the sun, and a contest seems to take place between the 
elements of winter and those of spring, in which he is the victor. 
As he enters Pisces, the fishes, it is Lent ; when he crosses the 
line it is the passover, the day of crucifixion, or Good Friday. 
As he rises up it is Easter, and ascends into heaven. They cross 
when he recrosses the line, and when Virgo, the virgin, stands at 
the foot of the cross. 

According, then, to the true signification of this sublime symbol 
of the pure ideal, greatly amplified from the Egyptian and Chal- 
dean model, Mary is the virgin mind, espoused to Joseph, the 
physical organization, but not as yet come together, the induced 
state of the bodily functions and the soul itself not being as yet 
in union. To this partition, which divides the reactive and con- 
trollable portion of the system from the mind's nature, brings on 
all the real evil in the world, and is precisely the same as in the 
case of Adam and Eve ; thus proving that it is the same mystery. 
It is in the breaking down of this wall that the redemption of 
man consists, the wall between the voluntary and involuntary 
powers — the wall between man and the Divinity. 



77 

False learning, tlie serpent, is now, however, tlie devil ; the 
garden of Eden is Gethsemane, the world ; the tree of knowledge 
of good and evil is the cross or gibbet; the seed of the woman, 
the offspring of the virgin mind — the Divinity of the soul coming 
in the world to destroy evil. 

In this way it is apparent that man's deliverance from error 
and its consequents belongs to the pure ideal, and therefore has 
to be " spiritually discerned." That this is the true interpreta- 
tion is proved by the text itself, as follo^^s, viz. : " In the city 
spiritually called Sodom, and Egypt where also our Lord was cru- 
cified." — Rev. 11, 8. That the crucifixion is still taking place is 
also made certain in the following words, viz. : *' Seeing they 
crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh,'' — Heb. 6, 6. 

The Gnostics (from gnosis to know or see), who were the first 
Christians, never held the view of a bona fide crucifixion of God, 
but believed that the whole should be understood spiritually, in 
which sense it conveyed highly useful and sacred instruction rela- 
tive to divine things. The followers of Ebion and Cerinthus, 
however, who were illiterate and not initiated, held that Christ 
was a corporeal being, a mere man, having no prior existence. 

The only correct reading of this sublime representation of the 
true ideal is, therefore, that first impressions appearing to the 
mind to be true, are absorbed by it. Hence, the mind, by being 
thus made to partake of those ^extraneous impressions, becomes 
isolated to the spiritual or true ideal, from the light, life and 
well-being constantly emanating from the Divine Mind, and the 
body isolated from the reactive and manageable condition of the 
nervous system. 

Humanity is thus represented as transfixed, or nailed hands 
and feet to a tree lying across the action or course of the fixed 
laws, which sweeps on with the impetus of an avalanche — as re- 
ceiving vinegar mingled with gall to drink — pierced in the side by 
the spear of error or physical force, during which period dark- 
ness reigns over the earth. Overcome at length by the success 
and triumph of false learning, the Divinity in the soul, although 
vanquished in death, comes off the conqueror, being enabled to 
exclaim, " It is finished !" Error, from which every disease, vice 



7S 

and crime drew its vitality — finished — ^bodily and mental ills 
ended ! 

" The vail of the temple is rent in twain from the top to the 
bottom." "The vail on their hearts" (intellects). "Know ye 
not that ye are the temple." — 1st Cor., 3, 16. The vail which 
separates the determinations from the real nature and laws of 
mind — the vail which kept the will absorbing in the support of 
false thought, the very agent required for the healthy action of 
mind and body. 

But, alas ! although the victory is thus proclaimed on the side 
of the pure ideal — on the side of the redemption from evil, still 
the fruits of it are not as yet rendered visible. The Divinity of 
the soul still lies entombed in the sepulchre of universities, 
divinity halls, councils, synods, gothic cathedrals, legislative 
halls, law courts, jails and modes of social life. A great stone 
of false literature is rolled to the door of the sepulchre; and 
everything " is made sure by sealing the stone and setting a 
watch." 

The mind (Mary) stands without at the sepulchre, and weeping? 
" saith, they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
they have laid him." But " a young man, sitting on the right 
side, clothed in a long white garment (reasoning from particular 
facts to a knowledge of the laws), rolls away the stone, and 
* saith, why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not here : 
Tie is risen.' " — Mark 16, 5, 6. 

As mankind are therefore enabled to see that it is the Divinity, 
in the soul that is risen ; " that all things which were written in 
the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms con- 
cern " themselves, although "their eyes were holden that they 
should not know" their deliverer ; and that they are the betrayed, 
the sacrifice, they will rise triumphant over the powers of dark- 
ness, disease, death (moral) and hell. 

Whenever, then, sufi'ering assails us, we are ourselves on this 
tree, nailed hands and feet to the cross by false theory and social 
imposts. By the very opinions we hold, sanction and even pay 
for, this serpent coils itself around us. Fascinated like birds by 
its seeming beauty, we are not apprised of its real nature until its 



79 

sting has pierced our vitals, and left deadly marks of its fangs 
in our feelings. We are thus the crucified. 

When we behold others laboring under badly-formed disposi- 
tions, chained to the vices of intemperance, strife, idleness, lying, 
swearing, avariciousness, swindling, stealing, fighting, ; see them 
falling into fits, taking consumption, fevers, cr the cholera ; or 
look on some born idiotic, others losing their reasoning faculties 
from distress, or the phantoms of a mistaken faith, or sinking into 
a premature grave ; the Divinity is expiring on the cross of false 
theory. 

When, also, we look on the ignorance, beggary, rags, filth and 
vagrancy of a class which seems to multiply with fearful rapidity 
on the aristocratic model ; or on the gout, rheumatism, repletion, 
sickness, insanity, fighting duels, going to the wars, vicissitudes, 
fears, cares and suicides of the rich, these are alike the victims 
of the serpent still triumphant, sufi'ering on this tree. 

It thus becomes at once certain that this state of mankind 
arises from their intellects, the region of their existence beyond 
consciousness, having been made to absorb and retain the world's 
false teachings, that this sad intellectual state is not the result 
of these wills, but that their wills are the results of this state. 
It is equally apparent that by changing the theory to indisputable 
facts the intellect of the world will control, in like manner, the 
direction and quality of every determination, and rise. Why, 
then, any longer " seek the living among the dead ? He is not 
here — he is risen ! 

That this mythic or symbolic representation of man's enlarge- 
ment from the domination of evil must be read philosophically is 
farther evident, because the Jews did not kill their Messiah, nor' 
did the Romans crucify him, crucifixion being not their mode of 
inflicting capital punishment. Nor is there any authentic account 
of even any semi-barbarous people nailing a culprit by the hands 
and feet to a tree with iron nails. St. Luke's words are, " The 
malefactors which were hanged." — Luke 23, 39. Peter and the 
other apostles also positively assert, " That God raised up Jesus, 
whom ye slew and hanged on a tree." — Acts 5, 30. 

Besides, by taking up a literal interpretation there are insuper- 



80* 

able difficulties, physical as well as moral. Of this description 
there are, derangements of the order of nature, contradictions, 
frauds, forgeries, even additions to the sacred text which did not 
exist in the original, and the famous admitted interpretation of 
Josephus. We have also letters long post-dated, gospels and 
epistles without number. We have the '' holy house of the 
Virgin," which came miraculously through the air across the Ad- 
riatic ; Christ's coat found at Tunis ; bleeding and weeping pic- 
tures, as much of the cross which, if collected, would build a 
74-gun ship, and a ray of the star which directed the wise men. 
We have likewise the immaculate conception, only just now 
decided on by the Catholic Church. But with all these, alas ! 
the angels' song still in the future." On earth 'peace^ good will 
towards men." 

Therefore "the mystery hid from the foundations of the 
world" must be " spiritually discerned." We must "look for a 
spiritual kingdom," "wherein dwelleth righteousness." Hence 
the true ]\Iessiah is the Divinity coming in the soul of man. 



81 



CHAPTER VII, 
THE CHANGE. 

In this age of improvements, although of a secondary charac- 
ter, the question asked is not whether such undertakings are prac- 
ticable, but merely what they will cost. Now, the change herein 
contemplated is that of the substitution of truth for unintelligible 
and false impressions, by which mankind can attain the object of 
existence, at a cost of only five per cent, on their present ruinous 
expenditure, without attaining the ends proposed. 

This difference is rendered apparent by the fact, that man 
existing under false impressions imposed on his intellect beyond 
consciousness, necessarily partakes of their nature, becomes iso- 
lated to the vitality and benign influence constantly radiating 
from the Divinity, and his body closed to the health-giving and 
restoring elements in the atmosphere. He therefore, beyond his 
own control, is rendered diseased, vicious and unmanageable. 
But by truth being imparted on his soul's vision, and from it 
being its native element, his soul responds in happy feelings and 
phenomena. 

The change herein proposed is, therefore, not that of interfer- 
ing with the institudons of governments, social relations, or rights 
of property, u^v simply that of extracting the evil out of human 
life, by expelling the cause, and thereby to reduce the heavy ex- 
actions imposed for the support of error. A change from contra- 
diction, divisions and strife to consistency, unity and peace. A 
change from darkness to light; from sufferings to the felicity 
designed for man and for which he is rendered capable of attain- 
ing ; from the iron rule of physical to the reign of moral force. 

To thus council man to exchange his aberrations, disease and 
misery for health and well-being may be a hard and thankless 
task, from the very fact that the poison has thus to be extracted 
from beyond consciousness ; but the triumph is as fixed as the laws 

H 



82 

by which, it must be accomplished, while the labor is its own 
reward. 

The cause of human obliquity and disease having been shown 
to exist in extraneous views of the order of nature and miscon- 
structions of sacred literature ; and it having been proved that 
man is only a wanderer from truth, good feeling and right action 
by social imputation ; that it is not his heart but his head that is 
wrong ; it therefore follows that, as those laws never change, it 
is the theory that must be brought into agreement with their 
happy action. By making this change, then, in man's mental 
vision, the same laws that cursed every hour, embittered every 
drop of happiness, open the sunshine of heaven, and bring down 
on their angel-wings every divine blessing fresh from " the giver 
of every good and perfect gift." 

But on our entrance into this field where undying laurels are 
to be won, we are met by the very authors themselves of the 
ring-streaked, speckled and- spotted among the flock; those who 
have been engaged in holding up ^' rods qf: green jpoplar before 
thirsty flocks when they came to drink." — Gen. 30, 37, 38. 
Those who have been rendering mankind ignorant, poor, vicious 
and criminal, argue that if human actions are necessary then 
human responsibility is destroyed, all notions of merit and 
demerit, praise and blame, reward and punishment are abrogated; 
and besides an unanswerable excuse is afforded for all actions, 
however vicious. 

It being, however, an admitted truth by friends and foes, as 
well as being demonstrable, that the will moves as it is moved 
by causes sucked in with a mother's milk, long prior to years of 
understanding, and hence existing in the region of the brain 
beyond consciousness, and that it acts with as great regularity 
from its cause as physical effects attend on their causes, and often 
as perceptibly, we must admit that man wills and acts as society 
has wrought on his mental faculties. It therefore becomes at 
once certain that if he wills and acts wrong, society having sup- 
plied the qualities to the agencies which have been at work on 
him, has first neglected to discharge its responsibility to, while it 
baa been claiming responsibility from him, 



Here the frightful conviction is forced on us, that the aristo- 
cratic theory of man, religion and government has been making 
mankind destitute, vicious and criminal, and then torturing and 
strangling them for being so. By thus supplying the mental 
states, and invoking the very influences which have impelled 
them "to will and to do" — all the wrong which ever has been per- 
petrated must be charged to the false views of the divine order. 
Hence society has been exacting a conduct it failed to render 
possible, a character which it failed to impart, and moral distinc- 
tions, which it neither defined nor observed. Consequently it 
has punished where it hath not taught, sought " to reap where it 
hath not sown, and to gather where it hath not strawed." 

In this way, it is established beyond all cavil that had the 
theory been derived from particular facts, instead of being unfor- 
tunately merely assumed, had it been made to accord with the 
nature, or had the world's teachers first understood themselves 
the sacred oracles, then society would have done its part — first 
discharged its side of the responsibility; then the unhallowed 
conditions to evil would not have been invoked, and then man, it 
is very certain, would have done his duty and fulfilled his part of 
the responsibility. 

In whatever clime or state, whether in a cabin, the battle, by 
land or sea, on a throne or the gallows, still no stamp was ever 
truer to the die* To claim, therefore, responsibility before yield- 
ing it, is only the province of sanctimonious villainy and savages. 
Grant, then, oh ! grant responsibility to man ! It may, indeed, 
be called a new doctrine — a strange freak of some dreamer. 
But nevertheless try it by way of a change or experiment; and 
the throne of the Eternal must fall before man can fail ! 

Strange that the professor of moral science, the clergy, jurist 
and legislator should require to be informed at this late day that 
responsibity is reciprocal, that they "on the one part'' have 
failed first to discharge their responsibility to man, and that this 
is the sole cause why man has failed on his part. True, they 
have hitherto succeeded in transferring the failure directly to 
human nature, and indirectly to an Almighty Parent. They 
have even fathered it on an alleged agent of evil, nowhere to be 



84 

found in God's world, except in their own false impressions. 
Not one, then, who has done wrong has had the responsibility on 
the side of society discharged towards him. 

Hence, had the learned judge on the bench sustained the loss 
of a guardian in his early years as did the criminal at the bar, 
and had that criminal been tended, cared for and educated, then 
the judge would have been the criminal, and the criminal his 
judge.^ 

Society will thus at length be made aware that it has been ex- 
acting responsibility before yielding it, and therefore must " look 
on him whom they have pierced and mourn ; and all kindreds of 
the earth shall wail because of him." 

When its duty to its members shall once begin at the other 
end ; when it shall have the good sense to assume to itself the 
burden of their offences, to see itself as the prime-motor to all 
their aberrations and diseases, then the happ^ change herein 
contemplated must take place. As it comes to cxcaange its false 
organic view that an effect can take place wichout cause, in the 
determinations of the will, for the fixed law, that itself, although 
unperceived and denied, moulds every decision, " then may man- 
kind lift up their heads with joy, for behold the day of their 
redemption draweth nigh." 

Hitherto it has taught man to regard himself at heart bad, a 
sinner by nature, and a voluntary rebel to all good. In this way 
it has paralyzed every faculty, perverted every feeling, obstructed 
every avenue to good, and enlisted the force of habit on the side 
of wrong, by which any deviation from the accustomed path was 
rendered scarcely practicable. 

By being thus psychologized from his youth up no alternative 
was left to have acted any other part; and that part he has per- 
formed to the letter. 

But by making this change in, or raising the theory, man 
must respond to the altered spirit, and rise to higher and holier 
influences. Justified by an inward sense of the innocence of his 
real nature, and feeling himself at heart sound, he will be himself 
again, restored to a sense of peace within and to charity to his 



85 

fellow-man, will shed his evil habits, his errors and diseases, and 
rise to the true nobility of his nature. 

Complacency and delight must ever be felt for the happy reci- 
pient and amiable exponent of good influences; while compassion 
and a desire to reclaim the wanderer must be extended to the 
participant of unhappy agency. As to merit or praise, however, 
where all is inductive, everything received, and nothing the indi- 
vidual's own, there can be none to award. Moreover, where the 
established order is recognized and acted on, its observance is its 
own reward, and the violation its own punishment. 

But in thus claiming this blessed change for mankind, the 
advocates of free-will return to the combat, and assert that if the 
will is held to be necessary man is reduced to a mere automaton, 
a machine. Here, however, they forget what poverty-stricken, 
priest-ridden, drinking, fighting, swearing, foul-mouthed, vicious, 
criminal, diseased and broken-down machines their own theory 
has made him. Ah ! but say those maintaining a cause for every 
effect in moral as in physical occurrences, the simple similarity 
between cause and effect does not extend to or involve any other 
similitude. Such is merely an illustration of what is meant by a 
cause, and as such is not a parallel. 

Mechanical action relates to inanimate matter, and is a blind 
impulse, but mental action involves thought, feeling and moral 
influence, and belongs to mental power. Again, over physical 
necessity the agent has no choice, but in moral sequence he exer- 
cises his choice in making a selection of the inducement agree- 
able to his mind's states. Hence moral force is entirely different 
from physical impulse or mechanical action, yet each imply a 
cause, which is all that is claimed. The path to this change, 
therefore, brightens as we advance. 

It is in this way that mankind, by changing until they come 
into line with the action of the fixed laws from lying across their 
path, construct the ark of human weal, take in with them all the 
impressions proved true in their happy experience and as ema- 
nating from the Divine mind, and are thereby saved from the 
deluge of physical and moral evil. 

The life and health of the body, its organs and operations 



86 

coming from the soul through the action of the two forces of the 
nervous fluid, which for this purpose converge in the brain, are 
dependent on the soul's state and the electro-reactive state of the 
atmosphere. 

In like manner, the soul derives its life and health from the 
source of all being ; but, although it possesses the properties and 
elements from which it emanates, and to which it returns, it is 
stimulated to inherent action by impressions made on, or as taken 
in by it from the external world or moral atmosphere. Evil 'is 
thus reduced to the dimensions of a nutshell. 

It is in the soul's induced state beyond consciousness, where 
the elements of every disease and human ill in every shape exist 
in embryo, and there where the cure and prevention must take 
place. 

No wonder, then, if human ailments and sickness baffles the 
skill of the physician, as his power does not extend so far into 
the soul's realm ; nor is it strange that poverty, mendicity, 
vagrancy, prostitution and famine prove too much for the legis- 
lator ; or immorality too gigantic for the moral teacher -, while 
crime laughs at jails, law books, judges and the gallows. 

We have now reached, very imperfectly it is true, the hidden 
cause of mental and bodily ill, found that it exists nowhere ex^- 
cept in false assumptions of the learned relative to the true order 
of nature, and shown that it is only according to these illusions 
themselves that a cure cannot be established, but that it can be 
brought about by listening to the voice of nature herself, and 
that the Divinity coming in the soul is to bring about this great 
end. It has been proved that mental and bodily evils take their 
rise from the darkness and poisonous elements infused into the 
moral atmosphere by none except the very teachers of all the 
various sects themselves, and made to pass current for sacred 
truth. It has been shown that the functions of mind and body 
under this diseased state of the intellect, although imperceptible 
to the persons themselves, are made to waste the involuntary 
radiations of the soul "on trifles light as air," to close the bodily 
functions to the electro-reactive conditions in the physical atmos- 
phere, and thereby to locate ail the pains, aches and diseases in 



87 

the body, and all the vices and disorders in society by induction 
from the theory. 

It will be admitted that the task is too great, especially for an 
incompetent hand ; yet that forms no argument for not attempt- 
ing it. The man who cultivated the first piece of ground was not 
very skillful, nor aware t® what extent the science of agriculture 
could be carried. It is, therefore not beyond the pale of possi- 
bility or human hope that the culture of the moral soil will be 
attended by still greater results. 

This Tract has therefore been devoted to changing the phan- 
tasmagoria, or illusions made to pass before the mind's vision, by 
which the radiations from the Divine source have been shut out, 
and all the furies in the false ideal let loose to curse the world. 
Tract No. 2 will contain the cure, by changing the theory of man 
to the true ideal, where harmony, peace, health and happiness 
for ever reign. 

Presto, change ! As natural science dawned on the world, 
the mind's states, the conditions under which man lived, and 
hence his will, character and actions have altered. The pursuits 
and professions which false views of physical nature gave birth 
to, the astrologer, diviner, soothsayer, necromancer, magician, 
miracle -worker, alehymist and witch have passed. 
, The simple exercise of men's understanding on this side of the 
region of consciousness, applied to external nature, had an indi- 
rect yet irresistible bearing on their notions of moral truth. 
Luther transubstantiates the "real body and blood" back again 
into emblems — the constituents of humanity — simply bread and 
wine. He breaks in on the false ideal, the divine right to sell 
indulgences for doing wrong. From the small and apparently 
trifling circumstance of taking the sale of heaven's warrants 
from his order, the Augustine friars, and giving it to the Domin- 
icans, a dreadful convulsion takes place in the world of mind — 
the false ideal is in fits — and whole nations change, like soldiers 
going through their exercise, at the word of command. 

Tortato, the Catholic bishop of Avila, near the close of the 
fifteenth century, declares, in his commentary on Genesis, " that 
the faith is shaken if the earth is believed to be round." "And 



88 

it was so" — shaken, and still keeps on shaking. The stake-fires 
have been put out, the witch act repealed, but not before 1736..^ 
The inquisition, which existed as late as 1813, abolished — the 
toleration act passed — disabilities on account of religion removed, 
imprisonment for debt abrogated — and capital punishment reduced 
down to extreme cases of atrocity, without any sign of an in- 
creased thirst for taking life, or the perpetration of crimes 
formerly deemed capital. 

Men there are who stiir live surrounded hj high walls, iron 
gates, safely esconced behind heavy locks, bars and bolts, trust- 
ing to watch-dogs, stacks of bayonets, parks of artillery, police, 
jails and gibbets, who have hunted God's creatures off the soil of 
their birth, far from the graves of their fathers, fired their cabin 
homes, and who still maintain that man is incapable of self- 
government.' The premises, however, on which they ground 
their theory are, that man is ignorant, poor, drunken, vicious, 
diseased, criminal and destitute of self-reliance. But they close 
their pious eyes to the fact that it is only under ecclesiastical 
sway that he is so, only under popular subjection. 

The frightful nightmare of popular sovereignty haunts their 
midnight pillow. The very thought of a nation of freemen rising 
from thirteen to thirty millions, covering a continent without 
force of arms, existing as a band of brothers for nearly a cen- 
tury, and which may cover the globe itself, is unbearable, is too 
horrible to be borne ; and the balance of power, oh ! 

To those blissful changes which have been taking place in the 
sentiments and condition of mankind, there are many others 
which have been and are occurring which have a direct bearing 
on the cure of physical and moral evil, such as the freedom of 
the press, the spread of schools, the peaceable discussion of all 
subjects without the church invoking the tender mercies of the 
magistrate, and the physician making appeals to the soul itself 
instead of relying solely on the curative power of materia medica. 
Moreover, there are strong indications in this generation of man 
returning, after a long privation, to his natural drink. Prome- 
theus was bounds the Divinity in the soul was nailed — but "he is 
risen!" 



89 

Society has, therefore, undoubtedly undergone great changes, 
and is ceaselessly altering, as the mental states of mankind come 
to perceive that nature is governed by fixed laws, and as they 
fall in with the order natural to body and mind. 

All will readily admit that vast changes have been made in the 
bringing to perfection, by culture, plants and animals, together 
with the improvement of the soil. 

In effecting those changes, however, it is evident that nature, 
or the laws by which it is governed, were not sought to be 
changed ; but merely that the states and conditions made to 
attend them were rendered more congenial to nature. In like 
manner, it is only by correcting the theory, the mind's states and 
attendant agencies that the most startling changes are to be 
wrought relative to human nature. 

The fatal error that moralists have fallen into concerning man 
is, that they endeavored, by a resort to physical force, to alter 
his nature according to the views that they formed as to what he 
ought to be ; as if they knew better than the Intelligence that 
has combined such wonderful powers together for the accomplish- 
ment of high designs, as if the working of the laws of mind 
were contingent in themselves, or that wisdom Infinite had erred. 
In modern times it is admitted that, by improvements in the 
healing art and in the altered modes of life, a generation, or the 
average period of man's age, has increased by ten years ; that is, 
the term of life has increased from thirty to forty years as the 
average, thus proving that far greater changes are in embryo* 
But it is very remarkable, amidst such a variety of modifica- 
tions, improvements and changes, so extremely little should have 
been accomplished in the moral field where so much has been 
paid for, where the most might have been expected, and where 
undoubtedly so much has to be done. 

Once more, presto, change ! Then, as the true view of the 
motions of the soul's world comes to be known, and as mankind 
come to see the constant uniformity and regularity of the laws of 
mind, and conform in thought, language, feeling and action to 
this motion, in like manner as the astrologer, the alchymist, the 
witch, heretic, diviner and miracle-worker ; the demons, angels, 
12 



90 

spirits, devil, oligarcli, hierarch, and fortune-teller, must now 
take an eternal farewell of every nook and corner of God's world, 
simply because they cannot, find believers ; so will the ignorant, 
the idiot, pauper and prostitute, the vicious, diseased, insane, 
the warrior, incendiary and criminal disappear with the theory, 
impressions and spirit which ga^e them birih — "a local habitation 
and a name" — and 

" Like the baseless fabric of a vision, 
Leave not a wreck behind." 

Who could have thought it ? Who could have ever dreamed 
that the philosophy of man, and through it, the education, gov- 
ernment, law, intercourse and religion should in this way turn 
out, after all the pretensions of what they were to do for human 
nature, to be the only cause in God's universe of all the ignorance, 
ill-feeling, vice, poverty, insanity, disease, war, theft, incendiarism, 
robbery and murder in the world ? 

Through this denial that there is any law guiding all moral 
occurrences with the same degree of certainty, and as visibly, as 
there is a law directing all physical events, final causes are so far 
opposed by secondary for a time as to exile Divine Power from 
the highest and holiest province of creation. Hence, to control 
the ideal under false learning, the masses have to be kept to a 
literal or vulgar sense of symbolic writings, which all nations, 
sects, families and individuals have to have faith in, than to pay, 
toil, and sufier for the support of standing armies, police, navies, 
law courts, judges, jails, penitentiaries, gibbets, workhouses and 
hospitals, in proportion to the wants of truth. 

Hundreds of millions of dollars yearly, rivers of blood, and 
an ocean of misery, of which no calculation can be made, make 
up the dread cost of working against this fixed law, denying this 
certainty and thereby being in opposition to Omnipotence. 

But by making the change herein advocated, through recog- 
nising this great rule of action in the movements of the true 
ideal, which makes the weal or woe in the actual, and for the 
knowledge of which the race have paid so dear, employing a 
small standing army of professors of the true motions at little or 
no cost comparatively, and adjusting the agencies attending man 



91 

to his nature ; then national calamities, social, domestic and pri- 
vate ill and bodily suffering must cease by the limitation of their 
cause. 

Then, " there shall be no more curse," " God shall wipe away 
all tears from their eyes ; and there shall be no more death 
(moral), neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any 
more pain ; for the former things are passed away." 

It being only this old illusion that things fall out of themselves, 
that the will moves the electric fluid, so as the muscular power of 
body to action in another way than as itself is moved by moral 
impulse, which forms the fountain-head of human ill, sorrow and 
discord, from being made the basis of thought, feeling and reli- 
gion, it is therefore the only enemy of the soul, the only devil 
that has haunted, beset and overcome mankind. But by ex- 
changing this fallacy of the learned for the divine first fact, that 
the will moves as it is moved by accompanying influence, and by 
transferring all endea^^ors to alter nature to the correcting of its 
state, truth will at length prevail over ancient error, virtue 
triumph over hoary vice, health over disease, and happiness over 
misery. Nations will be enabled to read anew the fate and 
reverse the destinies of man ; and human life will be delivered 
from physical and moral evil. The soul will thus be without a 
devil, man without an enemy, the parish without a jail, the city 
without an liospital, insane asylum, or house of refuge, the work- 
house without a tenant, the barracks without a soldier, earth " 
without a gibbet, and the universe without a hell ! 

In conclusion, by the erection of this first fact to its rightful 
place in the sentiments of the world, man is not looked on aa 
chargeable with his state ; but if that state is unhappy and inju- 
rious, other influences and a better spirit are invoked, the true^ 
ideal is opened, and a voice is heard saying, " Why persecutest 
thou me T' " Then went the devils out of the man and behold 
he sits clothed and in his right mind." 

The world, thus redeemed, will not confine its culture to the 
soil, plants, the lower animals, or external nature, but will impart 
sound views of the divine order, cultivate the moral soil, the 
natural goodness of man, and practice the law which guides 



92 

the motions of the soul's Trorld, as well as to see to the'agencieg 
drawn around and made to bear on human susceptibilities. 
In this way the intellect and moral emotions will be raised 
to their true place, and the instincts and appetites rendered 
subservient to them. 

Instead of attacking with animal ferocity the unwilling reci- 
pient of a depravity forced on him by agencies over which he 
could have no control, of seeking for doubtful palliatives for 
sickness, or dangerous nostrums to ward off dissolution in drugs, 
the chief cause having been found to be false mental impressions, 
the mind is brought to a just balance, and the electricity of the 
system is retained in, or restored to its natural equilibrium, by 
which the body is rendered positive to surrounding deleterious 
agencies thi'ough the inculcation of moral truth. 

By a return to the natural kind of food and drink, wearing 
clothing adapted to the human body and climate and temperature, 
paying due regard to fresh air, exercise and bathing, the 
health equipoise will be retained in the involuntary organs, 
thereby obviating injurious physical impressions. 

Thus physical and moral ills will cease with the reduction of 
tlieir source. Death, as far as relates to its pains, doubts, anxi- 
eties and terrors, will itself die. According to the divine purpose, 
the passage through the dark valley will be lit up with internal 
illumination, and a painless, blissful change of sensation will take 
its place, as the soul's vision opens on still grander and purer 
scenes in the true ideal/ 

Men being now at length brethren, the globe itself, like primi- 
tive Christianity, or like heaven, will be a democracy ; nations 
purged of aristocratic theory, will be true republics. A congress 
of nations " will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their 
spears into pruning hooks." "Those who build houses will in- 
habit them," for " the land will not be sold for ever ;" and " the 
lion shall dwell with the lamb." Earth will be an Eden with- 
out a serpent ; and " God will indeed dwell with man." 

END OF TRACT NO 1. 



94 

N.B. — The forthcoming two Tracts will complete the series, 
embracing the Cure and Application. 



Another work opening up more fully the Mysteries of Religion 
is ready for the press. 



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